Provident Fund Withdrawals Do Not Require Employer Attestation? Check, If You Are Eligible

There have been several instances where employees looking to withdraw funds from their provident fund account got stuck. It may be due to several reasons – employer firm may have closed shop, employee joins another organisation in a different city thus inhibiting smooth communication with employer, or the employer itself may create unnecessary delay.

To make a withdrawal from one’s PF account, one requires filling up the form no. 19, form no. 10 C & form no. 31, as the case may be, and getting them verified and attested by employer before submitting. This process of withdrawal for such employees has been made simpler by Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) as the employee is no longer required to verify the form by his employer, provided few conditions are met.

Here’s a checklist to view if you as an employee could benefit from the EPFO’s move:

Do you have UAN - The ease of withdrawals has been made possible largely because of the EPFO’s initiative to provide employees with the UAN-universal account number.

Have you provided KYC details to employer- After launch of UAN, EPFO has started collecting the KYC details of employees such as Aadhaar, PAN, Bank details etc. duly attested by the employer. Check, if your employer has asked for it, else furnish them to your employer.

Is KYC seeded and uploaded to UAN portal - Thereafter, the employer has to link/seed the Aadhaar and bank details as KYC and upload the same to the UAN portal duly attested through Digital Signature.

Filled form 11 (New) - All the employees then are being asked by EPFO to complete their Form-11 (New) details and submit through employer.

What to do as an employee - Once, those conditions are met, the employee can just provide mobile number, address, UAN and cancelled cheque of bank account as basic details and submit the same self-attesting the documents. The new forms for the employees will be Form-19 (UAN), Form-10-C (UAN), and Form-31 (UAN) as per the case.

Outcome - Those who have fulfilled the above conditions of KYC submission will no more be required to get their forms attested through the employers. Based on his KYC submitted by employer the money will be sent to employee’s bank account provided by the employer while seeding attested KYCs. Earlier it was only the employer who could identify the worker and his/her details, now it’s your KYC details which would be sufficient.

For all those employees, whose UAN has neither been generated nor linked, the withdrawals process remains offline and manually processed by filling up the existing form no. 19, form no. 10 C & form no. 31 as the case may be. Get in touch with your employer to ensure all these conditions have been met by both you and the employer for a smooth withdrawal process when the time arrives.