‘No recruitment, minimal resources’: EPFO officers body urges govt to hire experts to improve service delivery

The EPF Officers' Association has urged the Labour & Employment Ministry to bring in more technocrats and professionals to strengthen EPFO's digital infrastructure and improve service delivery.

In a letter to the Labour minister, the body pointed out that the first policy-level failure is that the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) is attempting to run a modern, technology-driven organisation without adequate internal IT infrastructure, news agency PTI reported on Tuesday.

There has been no recruitment in the critical Information Services Division (ISD) of EPFO for the past several years, the association said, adding that the last direct recruitment to ISD was in 2004.

Many of the joint directors and deputy directors in that EPFO division have either retired or resigned, and no replacements have been made, it stated.

'No full-time CTO hired yet'

The association also claimed that the retirement fund body has been unable to recruit a full-time chief technology officer (CTO) for the past three years, leaving ISD to operate with minimal resources.

The body is of the view that an external agency for software development is welcome. However, if there are insufficient internal technical experts to guide, assist and assess, the quality of output cannot be ensured.

New EPFO system still struggling with backlogs

The officers’ body said the problem has become particularly evident after the rollout of the Centralised IT Enabled System (CITES), which was expected to automate the process and reduce claim settlement to 2-3 days. Instead, it claimed that a large number of auto claims remained pending for more than 20 days.

“Unfortunately, the experience till now has been quite the opposite. Lakhs of auto claims were kept pending in the system for more than 20 days, with no explanation to either the field offices or to the members,” it noted.

The association said field-level staff were left to handle a large volume of member complaints on official grievance portals, social media platforms, and through in-person interactions without adequate support. It added that the significant rise in grievances on the CBT Chairman's social media handle reflects growing dissatisfaction among EPFO members.

The CITES project was given to CDAC in January 2023, with a 10-month timeline. The project has been inordinately delayed in the development stage, and even now, it has been implemented in July 2026 in a piecemeal manner, the body noted.

Rising workload, outdated staffing: EPFO offices face growing strain

The body said that EPFO's last organisational-level assessment of workload was conducted in 2016-17, and field offices continue to operate with manpower levels based on that outdated assessment.

The officers’ body further noted that the EPFO has grown significantly in scale over the past decade, yet current manpower sanctions are equal to the sanctioned posts as of March 2008.

As a result, major metro offices such as Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, and Gurugram are facing severe pressure, with outdated staffing norms being used to serve a large and increasingly technology-savvy subscriber base. According to the association, this mismatch has contributed to rising member grievances and growing operational stress across field offices.

The body also pointed to the appointment of generalist officers without prior experience of how the EPFO functions.

Parliament, in its wisdom, empowered the Central Board of Trustees through the EPF & MP Act 1952 and the Code on Social Security 2020 to appoint as many officers and staff as are required for efficient administration of Schemes or any other responsibility assigned to it.

The body stated that, for reasons not clear to us, the Board has, over the years, been very hesitant to exercise this statutory authority available to it. The EPF Officers' Association has been repeatedly requesting that norms be specified and that technology be continuously upgraded to handle the increasing workload.

Sanctions are not forthcoming, and technology remains at a very rudimentary level requiring manual certification of various processes, it noted. This defeats the very purpose of technology augmentation and automation support if almost every transaction requires manual oversight, it held.

(With inputs from PTI)