EPF Withdrawals don’t need Employer’s Attestation

The Employee Provident Fund (EPF) is one of the national investment opportunities for salaried people. A small faction of your salary is deposited in EPF account and the same amount will be deducted from your employer in every month.

The PF Contribution Amount by Employee and Employer is maintained by the EPFO department (Employees Provident Find Organization), controlled by the Ministry of Labor and Employment, India.

What is new in EPF Withdrawals?

At present, the EPF subscribers can claim their withdrawal amounts manually without permission of their present or former employers. Previously, the attestation form by the employer was mandatory for the EPF withdrawal purpose.

This direct EPF withdrawal facility is available for those employees who’s UAN (Universal Account Number) Number has been activated. And also the UAN should be linked to Bank and Aadhaar Account.

With activation of UAN, you will be able to claim EPF amount directly through Form-10C, Form-19 and Form-31 and these filled forms need to be submitted to the respective PF commissioner for a faster settlement.

Restriction on Withdrawal Cases: Have you any idea that it’s restricted to withdraw your EPF amount when you’re continuing jobs? If yes, then you will be able to withdraw your EPF amount if you don’t have a job at the time of withdrawal. You can only transfer your EPF amount to new PF account when you are changing jobs.

As per Sharad Patil, secretary general of EPFO, India, “the updating in EPF Withdrawal procedure looks “logical”. If the EPF will be withdrawn through UAN, Aadhaar and bank account, it will save the duration of settlement period and also avoid the chance of corruption in the EPFO.”

Other Facilities

• Insurance coverage amount has been increased up to Rs 6 lakh for EPF Account holders.
• Online facilities are available for knowing UAN.

As per the latest updates on EPFO website, more than 2 crore EPF members have activated their UANs and also the Admin body has allotted more 6 crore UANs (Approx).

Exclusion from EPF: You must have queries, “Can I be excluded from being an EPFO member?” Yes. If the basic salary is more than Rs 15K then subscribers have an option to be excluded from EPF Account. However, you can also make this choice at the beginning of your job. Once you’ve been a member of the EPFO, then you can’t get the option of elimination. So for every organization, there is a proper discipline and beneficial plans available.

Equity investment facilities for better return: Since the EPF is deducted from fixed income only and it can offer a good rate of return when the amount will be invested in equities. The government has approved to EPFO for investment of 5-15% of EPF money in the volatile stock market.

With this investment activities, EPFO is going to provide more and more benefits to its subscribers as mentioned above like Insurance coverage, interest rate (which is already increased in past) and also there is more chance on increasing rate of interest in future.

Nomination Facility: As you know, you can assign a nominee for the withdrawal amount of provident fund after your death or any emergency case. The nominee name mentioned in your EPF account would be contacted by EPFO after death and handed over all your deposited money. If you want to change the nominee name from your PF account any time, you have to fill Form 2 and submit with immediate effect.

Benefits of EPS (Employee Pension Scheme): Hope you must have an idea about benefits of deduction of 12% from your salary every month towards your Provident Fund Account. However, out of the total deposited money every month in your PF Account, your employer contributes 8.33% of it towards your Provident fund and the rest amount into your pension scheme. You will be able to claim pension amount only if you’ve survived minimum 9.5 years of working life and your EPF amount has been transferred when you changed different jobs.

Growth of EPFO

As per Mr. Jalan “For supporting of retiring subscribers, we are focusing to provide more benefits from every angle. We are becoming PF Account holder-friendly and expect more people can be beneficial from it. By adopting this practice, corpus and the subscriber base will be growing more, EPFO will be progressing more and more.”

The corpus of EPF has been increasing by 15% every year since last couple of years by increasing EPF subscribers and Stock exchange investment.

Importance of RTI Application: In order to get any information or resolution of issues, you have to fill an RTI Application. The information is related to PF transfer or withdrawal or balance availability. The RTI application is a type of inquiry form to communicate with EPFO.