Most of the private sector organisations use Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) as the scheme to provide retirement benefits to its employees. The EPF has three components – Provident Fund (PF) for accumulation of retirement corpus, Employees’ Pension Scheme (EPS) for regular pension and Employees’ Deposit Linked Insurance (EDLI) for providing insurance cover.
Due to lack of job security and for better opportunity, many private sector employees change their jobs. As EPF investments are long-term investments meant to provide retirement benefits to employees, the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) provides option to employees either to transfer the accumulated amount to the new organisation after switching their job or to withdraw the amount after leaving an organisation.
Apart from keeping the retirement corpus intact, tax liabilities and constraints on withdrawal of EPS contributions make PF transfer a better option than withdrawing it.
However, employees may face some problems while transferring their PF from an exempted establishment (where the PF is managed by a trust) to an un-exempted establishment (where the PF is managed by EPFO) and vice versa.
Prashant Singh, Business Head – Compliance and Payroll Outsourcing, TeamLease Services explains which transfer mode to adopt in such a case and how to transfer your PF.
- Offline transfer of PF may be done only in case of transfer from an exempted establishment to another exempted establishment. For all other cases, the transfer may be done online. So, in case of transfer of PF are from one un-exempted establishment to another un-exempted establishment or from exempted establishment to un-exempted establishment or from un-exempted establishment to exempted establishment or only (for EPF exempt members) from un-exempted establishment to un-exempted establishment is online.
- Before initiating the PF transfer process, an employee should have activated his/her Universal Account Number (UAN) and also update mobile number, Aadhar number, bank account details, date of exit from the previous employment. The UAN may be activated and other details may be entered by visiting at unifiedportal-mem.epfindia.gov.in/memberinterface/ portal. Moreover, transfer of PF from an old establishment to a new establishment has to be done in one go, as only one transfer request against a previous member ID is accepted.
- For online PF transfer, you have to log in to the EPF portal (unifiedportal-mem.epfindia.gov.in/memberinterface/) by using your credentials i.e., UAN and password. After log in, you have to verify your personal information and PF account for present employment by clicking on ‘One Member Online Services’. After verification, based on the availability of authorised signatory holding DSC, choose either your previous employer or current employer for getting the claim form attested. After that, choose either of the employers and provide your member ID/UAN and then you have to click on ‘Get OTP’ to receive an OTP in your UAN-registered mobile. The transaction will complete, once you enter and submit the OTP.
