According to The Indian Express report, A group of employees at a Mumbai office of the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) allegedly siphoned over Rs 21 crore from a common PF pool through fraudulent withdrawals.
According to the internal investigation, that five employees from EPFO’s Kandivali office transferred money through 817 bank accounts established in the names of migrant workers between March 2020 and June 2021.
The fraud, which came to light in July through an anonymous call, has been allegedly engineered by 37-year-old clerk Chandan Kumar Sinha, a graduate from Bihar, who is currently on the run.
The modus operandi of the team highlights key loopholes in the system, which were manipulated by the fraudsters. Sinha, who has a thorough knowledge of the system, acquired bank details and Aadhaar numbers of migrant works who received a small sum of money in return. These were used to open PF accounts in companies that have been shut for more than 10 years.
The EPFO has requested banks to freeze the 817 accounts used for the fraud. It now plans to hand over the investigation to the CBI after completion of the internal audit.
Recently, the government of India has issued a mandate in which a deadline of August 31 is the EPFO deadline for linking your Universal Account Number (UAN) to your Aadhaar card.
If the employer does not have their UAN linked to your Aadhaar card by the deadline, they will be unable to make the monthly contributions to the EPF account. Additionally, employees will also not be able to withdraw the funds from their PF accounts if they do not adhere to the deadline.
