Is EPFO the reason your employer isn’t depositing your provident fund? https://the-ken.com/story/epf-defaults-are-off-the-charts-blame-the-epfo/ the EPFO steadily dismantled the systems meant to spot defaults. Internal systems that once flagged defaulters were scrapped, and local offices say even obvious signals like payments slowing then stopping were routinely ignored... The fix was supposed to be technology. Essentially, big data and smarter systems. Much of that tech either doesn’t exist or work, or sits behind opaque processes that field officers can’t actually use.
While some regional PF offices sporadically release names of defaulters, the EPFO does not publish a comprehensive list with the names and amounts in default. But the scale of the problem can be gauged from the “arrears management” section in its annual reports.
Between March 2019 and March 2023, the arrears by employers ballooned over 70% to over Rs 15,000 crore (over $1.6 billion). And in the next one year, it had increased another 70% to almost Rs 26,000 crore. Nearly Rs 10,000 crore of that is thanks to about 2,400 employers, each of whom had arrears of Rs 50 lakh or...
Naturally, there’s a vacuum. Nearly 70% of establishments registered with EPFO are now classified as non-contributory, up from roughly half five years ago. Some may fall outside the law. Many don’t. So, employees usually find out only when they try to withdraw their money, or when their families have to.
A fire at a Goa nightclub recently made all of this impossible to ignore. Twenty workers died, but EPFO officers later admitted they would struggle to secure provident fund, pension, and insurance benefits for the families because the employer had been defaulting for years without detection.
Anand’s story today traces how a drive to end the inspector raj hollowed out enforcement without a working replacement, and how amnesty schemes with token penalties reshaped incentives. It also sits alongside our earlier reporting on EPFO’s other failings, from masked inefficiencies dressed up as high returns to a long-simmering crisis of claim rejections.