Salaried employees in organised sector will have to provide their Aadhaar numbers for seeking benefits under the EPF scheme being operated by retirement fund body Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO). Moreover, it will also be mandatory for new members to submit their Aadhaar numbers as part of the KYC (Know Your Customer) verification from March 1, 2013.

However, It has been decided to make Aadhaar numbers mandatory for new members...joining on or after March 1, 2013. However for existing members, the seeding of Aadhaar number has to done in a time bound manner.

Moreover, in case an employee does not have the Aadhaar number, the employer can issue an Enrolment Id (EID) as per the guidelines of the body which would be converted into Aadhaar number later on.

In fact, the body would also seek the Aadhaar numbers of its pensioners through the banks and the pensioners can submit their Aadhaar number either to their pension paying branch of the bank or to the EPFO office. It seems, EPFO is working towards creating a central database where all members would have a unique account number and would not require to transfer PF accounts to another one in the event of changing jobs.

AW:Samrat Biswas