EPFO Service Delivery: Why EPF Officers’ Association Wants Expert Intervention To Strengthen CITES

The Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) Officers’ Association has issued a formal request to Labour and Employment Minister Mansukh Mandaviya for immediate intervention to strengthen the Centralised IT-Enabled System (CITES) infrastructure. The association requested recruitment of experts (technocrats and professionals) to enhance service delivery within the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO). 

CITES is a digital modernisation initiative designed to improve EPFO’s operations and service delivery, including reducing claim settlement time to just 2-3 three days. In reality, though, many claims remain pending for more than 20 days.

Critical Gaps In Service Delivery

The EPFO directly impacts the lives of around 250-300 million Indians, almost a fifth of the country’s population, according to a PTI report. Given this scale, the association has said that the organisation’s ability to function and deliver timely services cannot be taken lightly. It is a matter of national importance, it said. 

The association further said that while subscribers expect world-class services, including immediate claim settlement and grievance redressal, EPFO is still struggling to meet these standards, as reflected in the increase in public grievances, especially on social media platforms.

An Outdated IT Infrastructure

According to the association, a primary reason for service failures is that the EPFO is trying to run a modern technology-driven organisation with insufficient internal IT infrastructure. There has been no direct recruitment drive since 2004 in the EPFO’s Information Services Division (ISD), which is critical to operations. 

Therefore, many senior positions, such as joint directors and deputy directors, remain vacant following retirement or resignations. And as if this is not enough, EPFO has been unable to recruit a full-time chief technology officer (CTO) for the past three years.

The association also said that while the CITES project for digital modernisation was handed to Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) in January 2023, with a 10-month timeline, it has been delayed for inordinate reasons before being implemented by July 2026, which is also only in a “piecemeal manner”.

In short, the technology upgradation and improved service delivery have been more in the announcements rather than in implementation.

The association further said that at present, the ISD functions with minimal resources and while development is outsourced from CDAC, without internal experts, it is difficult, rather impossible, to ensure quality of output.

Obsolete Norms And Strained Manpower

The association said that the organisation is grappling with the staffing level that has not grown in line with growth in the number of EPF subscribers. According to it, the current manpower sanctions are based on staffing levels determined in March 2008, whereas the workload has increased immensely since then. This mismatch is more felt in metro cities, like Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Gurugram, among others, where staff is under severe strain trying to manage technology-savvy subscribers using outdated staffing norms, and antiquated internal IT-infra of the EPFO.  

Need For Expert Intervention

The Officers’ Association has said that the Central Board of Trustees (CBT), for some reason, has been hesitant in exercising its statutory authority to appoint the staff required for efficient administration of the scheme. The organisation’s current system remains at a rudimentary level, which requires frequent manual intervention for transactions instead of providing a seamless experience to subscribers.

Taking into account these issues, the association has now demanded a high-level response to plug the widening gap of technical officers and move away from the appointment of generalist officers who lack prior experience in EPFO’s specific functions. The association has suggested that without expert intervention to guide and assess the CITES project, the goal of providing an automated, efficient service delivery cannot be fulfilled.