Retirement fund body EPFO today said the Employees Provident Fund Scheme has been amended to include PayGov for financial transactions, thus enabling PF dues to be collected through the portal.
"The EPF Scheme has been amended to include PayGov platform for financial transaction. PayGov is a centralised platform for facilitating all government departments and services to collect online payments for government services," the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) said in a statement. At present, State Bank of India (SBI) is the sole collector of PF remittances on behalf of the EPFO.
Elaborating about other major achievements, EPFO said it redressed more than 40,000 grievances in June-July. Out of the pending grievances, most were pending for disposal for less than 7 days. Other developments in the period include giving an option to EPFO members to enhance their pensionary benefits. The benefits are available to members who defer their pension upto 59 or 60 years of age with or without contribution after the age of 58 years.
The benefit is increase in original pension by 4 per cent in case of completion of one year and 8.16 per cent in case of completion of 2 years after 58 years. In case a member defers the pension with contribution, the contributory service after 58 years of age will be included in calculation of pensionable service and pensionable salary, but will not be considered for determining eligibility. For availing this benefit, a member must have completed atleast 10 years of service on attaining the age of 58 years.
It said that with the objective of giving special emphasis on securing compliance in respect of all eligible contractual workers, meetings were held with CPWD, DMRC, MCD, NBCC, Railways and National Highway Authority of India during the period. A meeting of the Sub Committee of Central Board, EPF on Construction Workers was also held in which it was decided to explore whether cess collected on behalf of construction workers can be utilised to pay part of employees share of EPF of such low paid workers.
The online filing through ECR (Electronic Challan cum Return) is going to be further simplified with the Version II of ECR. The return format has also been simplified, it added.
