Mumbai: Retirement fund body Employees' Provident Fund Organisation, EPFO, has over past many months taken a slew of steps to make process of provident fund claims, checking PF balance and passbook online, a hassle free exercise. Till now, employees would come to know about their PF balance only after filing claims and subsequently receiving the corpus in their accounts.
EPFO's recent measures form part of government's larger campaign in favour of making India a cashless economy by pushing for digital modes of money transfer, transaction. Government's Digital India programme has already earned accolades from different quarters and also has led to people switching to online mode of making payments.
EPFO stores funds from companies that deposit employees' 12 per cent contribution along with employers' 8.33 per cent share with the retirement fund body. Remaining 3.67 per cent of employers' share goes toward employees' pension scheme.
There are as many as 5 crore subscribers to the provident fund saving scheme. The subscriber base had gone up by almost 20 per cent in July this year after employees came to know about an amnesty scheme introduced by EPFO. Back then, the organisation had said it hoped it would get an additional corpus in the range of Rs 6,000 to Rs 12,000 crore per annum.
Here are a few simple ways that will help you check your provident fund balance, e-passbook, claims status from just a press of a button.
Missed call
For availing this most simplest way of checking PF balance, an employee first needs to activate their Universal Account Number. An employer gives UAN to every individual employee. Once UAN is updated and linked to your PF account, you need to link Aadhaar with UAN and bank account as well.
After linking and activating all the three units, you are ready to go. You can give a missed call to 011-22901406. Your PF balance will get delivered directly to your mobile phone inbox through a regular text message.
e-Passbook, online balance
EPFO has placed and activated a link on its website that, after clicking, takes a user to the required page. The link could be found at the top right of the website, that could easily be spotted by doing a simple navigation on the page.
Here a user is asked to fill in his UAN and password in two blank boxes. UAN is distributed by EPFO through employers. It enables transfer of a PF corpus from one provident fund account to another. After feeding the required details, a subscriber can click on View Passbook option and check the same. The whole process has been introduced to make all PF related procedures hassle free exercise.
