- Note that the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) allows full withdrawal of funds only if you’ve been unemployed for at least two months
- In 2017, the EPFO introduced a simplified one-page claim form which can be used for partial as well as complete withdrawal
If you are a salaried employee who makes regular contribution towards the Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF), we recommend you stay put until it’s time for you to retire because it’s more of a retirement product. However, if circumstances look grim and dipping into your EPF corpus is your only option, you may have to go for it. Note that the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) allows full withdrawal of funds only if you’ve been unemployed for at least two months. But, it does allow partial withdrawal for select expenses such as weddings and medical emergencies. You can read more about this here. We tell you how you can go about withdrawing you EPF account online.
“Over the past few years, the EPFO has gradually made withdrawal and claim settlement process a lot easier, convenient and less time consuming for salaried individuals. The launch of twin facilities in the year 2017, one of online withdrawal facility and the other of single claim form has significantly contributed towards making EPF withdrawal a speedy and less cumbersome process in comparison to the physical application method as well as submission of three different forms for the purpose of final PF settlement, pension withdrawal and partial withdrawal respectively,” said Naveen Kukreja, chief executive officer and co-founder, Paisabazaar.com.
In 2017, the EPFO introduced a simplified one-page claim form which can be used for partial as well as complete withdrawal. Until 2017, partial withdrawals required the investor to submit documents to prove why she was withdrawing. This has now been junked. This has been made possible after it became mandatory to link the Universal Account Number (UAN) with Aadhaar and bank account number. “The one page claim form replaced the then existing forms required for final PF settlement (form 19), pension withdrawal benefits (form 10C) and partial withdrawal (Form 31),” said Kukreja.
WITHDRAWAL PROCESS
Note that you can use the online withdrawal claim facility only if your Aadhaar is linked with your UAN. Also, remember that only those subscribers whose UAN has been linked with their Aadhaar and bank account number can do away with the need to get employer’s attestation for withdrawal, and can directly submit the claim form to the EPFO. For those whose details are not seeded in UAN, they would have to get the employer’s attestation before submitting the composite claim form (Non-Aadhaar) to the EPFO.
But before submitting the withdrawal application, couple of pre-requisites need to be factored in. “Firstly, the UAN needs to be activated and the mobile number used for activating the UAN should be in working condition. Secondly, UAN has to be linked with your Aadhaar, PAN and bank details along with the IFSC code,” said Kukreja.
