New Delhi: Retirement fund physique EPFO had on April 3 introduced two main reforms to make the declare settlement course of less complicated, quicker, and hassle-free for crores of EPF members & employers.

1. Elimination of Requirement to Add Picture of Cheque Leaf / Attested Financial institution Passbook

EPFO has fully allotted with the requirement of importing a picture of a cheque leaf or attested financial institution passbook whereas submitting on-line claims. This requirement was initially relaxed on a pilot foundation for sure KYC-updated members. Since its launch on twenty eighth Might, 2024, the transfer has already benefited 1.7 crore EPF members.

Following the profitable pilot, EPFO has now prolonged this rest to all members. Because the checking account holder’s title is already verified with the EPF member’s particulars on the time of checking account seeding with the Common Account Quantity (UAN), this extra documentation is not obligatory.

By eradicating this requirement, EPFO is about to right away profit round 6 crore members, eliminating declare rejections as a result of poor-quality/unreadable uploads and lowering related grievances.

2. Elimination of Requirement of Employer Approval for Seeding Financial institution Account Particulars with Common Account Quantity (UAN)

To streamline the method of seeding financial institution accounts with UAN, EPFO has now eliminated the requirement of employer approval after financial institution verification.

At the moment, each member is required to seed his/her Financial institution Account with UAN with a purpose to get their PF withdrawals seamlessly credited to such account. Through the F.Y. 2024-25, 1.3 crore members have submitted their requests for seeding their Financial institution Accounts and the requests after due matching with the respective Financial institution/NPCI are to be authorized by the Employer by means of DSC/E-Signal.

How Can Members Change Already-Seeded Financial institution A/c With New Account? Defined

EPFO mentioned that round 36,000 requests for seeding of checking account are being raised by the members every day and the banks take a mean of three days to finish the verification. Nevertheless, after the financial institution verification, the typical time taken by the Employer to approve the method is about 13 days leading to piling up of workload on the stage of the Employer and consequent delay within the seeding of Financial institution Account for the Member. Additional, this approval step just isn’t including any worth to the verification course of.

Accordingly, the position of Employer to approve the verification of checking account has now been allotted with within the seeding means of the member’s Financial institution Account.

The above simplified course of will even facilitate these members who need to change their already seeded Financial institution Account by coming into their new Financial institution Account no. together with the IFSC code duly authenticated by means of Aadhaar OTP.

The members who’re but to seed their Financial institution Account or change their seeded Financial institution Account can benefit from the above simplified course of to get their Financial institution Account seeded on the earliest, EPFO has mentioned.