PF May be Withdrawn Online from August, Says EPFO Official

New Delhi: Retirement fund body EPFO may launch by August an online facility to withdraw provident fund, a move that will reduce paperwork and provide hassle-free service to its subscribers. With the new facility, settling PF withdrawal claims would just take few hours. "We are hopeful of launching an online facility for PF withdrawal claims by August this year. We have already digitised our records and processes using Oracle operating system," a senior EPFO official told PTI. "EPFO will soon buy blade servers for setting up three Central Data Centres at Gurgaon, Dwarka (Delhi) and Secunderabad. All the three centres will be connected to 123 offices of the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO)," he said. The process of procuring servers would be completed by May while the testing would start in June to gauge the response of the system in place. "After intensive testing and trials in June and July, we are planning to launch the online PF withdrawal facility in August this year," the official said. Once this is operational, subscribers can apply online for PF withdrawal, which will be transferred directly to their bank accounts. At present, subscribers who wish to settle their accounts with the EPFO are required to apply manually. For settling online claims, the subscribers would have to activate their Universal (portable PF) Account Numbers which are seeded with KYC details including bank accounts, Aadhaar number and permanent account number. The EPFO has over five crore subscribers. As many as 6.15 crore UANs were issued by EPFO out of which 2.34 crore were activated by the subscribers so far. PTI