New Delhi, 9 April (IANS). The Employees Provident Fund Organization (EPFO) said on Wednesday that its members can now generate and activate their universal account number (UAN) using Aadhaar Face Authentication Technology (FAT) through Umang Mobile App.
This contactless and safe service will provide relief to crores of people of EPFO.
Earlier, UAN was mainly generated by employers using employee data presented to EPFO.
According to the Ministry of Labor and Employment, Aadhaar details have been verified, but mistakes were common in information like father’s name, mobile number or date of birth.
These mistakes often require improvement during claim process or when using other EPFO services.
Out of the 1.26 crore UAN allocated in FY 2024-25 alone, only 44.68 lakh (35.30 percent) were activated by members.
According to the EPFO, “Employees were given several reminders to the employers to activate their UAN using Aadhaar OTP, so that any benefit under the future employment linked scheme can be provided using DBT.”
The EPFO further stated that in many cases, the UAN was not told the employee and many of the mobile numbers were missing or wrong, making direct communication difficult.
In addition, the UAN activation was a separate process through the Aadhaar OTP verification on the EPFO member portal, which was to be completed by the member, which led to confusion.
To resolve these challenges, EPFO has now started the facility of creating and activating UAN directly using face authentication through the Umang app.
This service can be used by both employees and employers. This provides the base and 100 percent validity of the user using face authentication and the user’s data is already filled directly from the base database.
According to the EPFO, the user’s mobile number is matched with a mobile number registered with the base, and the UAN activation work on the EPFO portal is also completed during the generation process.
At the time of getting the job, the employee may hand over the E-UAN card PDF and UAN copy to join the EPFO. This allows EPFO services such as watching passbooks, updating KYC, submission of claims and access to other services immediately.
-IANS
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