E Filing Provident Fund

The Employees’ Provident Fund Organization, India, is one of the largest social security organizations in the world in terms of members and volume of financial transactions that it has been carrying on.

The total financial corpus managed by the EPFO is in excess of Rs. 2000 billion ($50 billion) and there are a total of about 40 million contributing and non contributing members in about 450,000 covered establishments.

The Employees’ Provident Fund Organization (EPFO) in its attempt to do a major Business Process Reengineering has introduced a system of Electronic Challan cum Return (ECR) Filing since April 2012 onwards. To automate and computerize the present system, this change will see around 450,000 establishments across the nation remitting the Provident fund contributions online.

ECR will facilitate automatic update of accounts on receipt of contribution by EPFO, download of annual accounts slips for employees from EPFO website. It will also dispense with forms 5, 10, 12A, 3A, 6A being submitted by employer of un-exempted establishment and forms 3PS, 4PS, 5PS, 6PS, 7PS, 8PS being submitted by the employers of PF exempted establishments.

This is a welcome step in the electronic age and will prove beneficial in the following ways:

* Greater convenience and ease to employers and greater transparency. Employers can not only pay online but also download Annual Accounts slips for their employees for the year 2010-2011 onwards from EPFO website.

* This will also result in better quality of service to the employees as now the employees would be able to check their balances online. They will see the detailed account statements with all credit and debit on request through the website. This will be enabled from 1st May 2012 as per the central government officials. Every year the statement of your PF account was being sent to the contributing member through the employer. The statement used to contain the opening balance (amount accrued till last year), amount contributed this year, Interest rate applied this year and the interest rate accrued this year, any withdrawal from the account if applicable.

* Automatic updation of accounts on receipt of contribution by EPFO.
What needs to be done by establishments?

For availing this facility, the establishments and authorized signatory are require to register their establishments on EPFO website www.epfindia.gov.in . They will be provided username and password for filing ECR.

This has to be done from April 2012 for the wage month of March 2012.

For further details visit
http://www.epfindia.com/Employer_eSewa.html