The Employees Provident Fund (EPF) Act amendment draft bill is expected to be finalised in the next three months, a top official said here on Wednesday.
The EPF has over 4.71 crore subscribers with a corpus of over Rs 2.57 lakh crore and an incremental deposit of over Rs 25,000 crore annually.
The government is planning to bring about certain reforms in the 60-year-old EPF Act. For instance, it plans to do away with assured pension in favour of an annuity scheme.
With the annuity structure, pension would depend on the corpus accumulated by an account holder. In case of Employees Deposit Linked insurance scheme, the EPFO was planning to introduce group scheme and separate pension.
“We want the pension to be for the individual and insurance for groups,” Mr S.Chatterjee, said. “This will result in higher insurance coverage which is limited to a maximum of Rs 1 lakh now.”
The EPFO is also planning to introduce e-payment, SMS alert and online account checking. The computerisation is expected to be completed next year by when all 120 EPF offices would be covered. EPFO was in talks with BSNL for SMS alerts and SBI for e-challan. —PTI