Need to improve our delivery system for those working with a firm for short-term: VP Joy

This is all the story of the past. All that is over and decisions have been taken and as such we do not have any such pending issue. Now the scheme is very clear and our job is to get more and more people enrolled and make it easy for our subscribers. We are on the task of making our system much better because EPFO needs lot of reforms that we have to undertake at our level.

What are the key reforms being planned?

The challenge in EPFO is that the scheme and its delivery is very good for employees who work in an organisation for the long-term but we need to improve our delivery system for those who work with a company for the short-term. People who work for shorter duration and who change the place and job are in huge numbers. For such people, we need to make our delivery system very good and make our products attractive. That is a key challenge. I think that after that we will automatically see a lot of people coming to us.

What is the required change?

The thing is that when one changes job, it requires a lot of administrative formalities like changing the account, transferring the account, and then your account is not transferred and people are not able to see their account or avail benefit from their account. These kind of hassles make our product little troublesome. At least, I can’t blame anyone, it may not be up to the mark. These things can be improved with technology. We have also launched one EPF account with one person. Today we have less than 4 crore active accounts who are contributing, but we have a total of 18 crore accounts in our system. Last year it was slightly more than 15 crore. So every year the accounts are growing because of this floating population and we have to stop this. There should be one EPF account for one person.

While, we currently have accounts at 120 places, we are shifting all our accounts to one central place and this should get completed in another two weeks. After that, anywhere in the country, people in our offices will be working on the central computer system. After we achieve that we will make one member one EPF account that will lead to avoidance of duplication of accounts and ultimately resolve the issue of inoperative accounts. All these are linked. The moment you solve the technology problem, delivery problem, lot of other problems will get automatically solved.

In the budget, there was a proposal to transfer unclaimed deposits to Senior Citizen Welfare Fund. How will unclaimed EPF accounts be transferred to the fund?

We have answered this aspect several times because there is no unclaimed deposit in EPF, there are inoperative accounts. Even if there are some deposits like that, we can’t say that no one will come to claim as they can come in future.

As such we have inoperative accounts, definitely. All inoperative accounts will be dealt according to law. We have a law, EPF Act that deals with all matters concerning accounts and money, even if there is no claimant in the country. So we will follow the law and deal with it.

The Finance Bill (now Act) had made amendments, which are overriding in nature with respect to other Acts?

I don’t want to dispute all that. We will do what is mandated by law. Actually speaking, for that issue, we have to take legal opinion. The labour ministry is also examining the matter and we will support them with whatever information they need.

How is the equity market performance affecting your investments?

These kind of long-term investments, it is not correct to monitor every day. We are neither looking like this, neither commenting. We are investing in these equity instruments for long term. All our investments are long-term, 10-15 years.

What about all the pending cases that EPFO has?

Today we are fighting 30,000 cases. While we are giving benefits to people, why should we be fighting cases with people. These cases are arising because people are not happy with delivery. We are trying to plug the problem. We would like to be in a system where the employees and employers come to us, instead of us pursuing them. We are going to improve our enrollment. I think that when our delivery improves, the number of cases will come down.