This is part of the series of measures announced by EPFO over the last one month under EPFO 2.0 initiative to streamline processes and simplify procedures. Last week, the EPFO had introduced two key changes, removal of requirement to upload image of cheque leaf or attested bank passbook, and doing away with the need for employer approval for seeding bank account details with UAN.
Under the new process, Aadhaar-linked face authentication technology (FAT) will be used to generate UAN using the government’s UMANG application and the government expects it will address impediments like non-availability of mobile number of the subscriber in the EPF database and mismatch errors in personal details in authentication of UAN in the existing process.
“Both employers and employees can generate UAN through face activation now. This would be a key step towards contactless, secure, and fully digital service delivery for crores of members, labour and employment minister Mansukh Mandaviya said on Tuesday.
As of now, UANs are mainly generated by employers by submitting data of employees (members) to EPFO. Though this data is validated using Aadhaar data, many errors were being made in other fields such as father’s name or mobile number, etc. Owing to these errors, many employees had to update their data while submitting claims or for other benefits, the ministry of labour and employment said.
According to the ministry, 12.7 million UANs were allotted by EPFO in 2024-25. However, only 4.46 million UANs or 35.3% were activated by the members during the last financial year.The ministry also said it has notified six more districts in Bihar to allow over 24,000 beneficiaries of the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) to avail social security benefits under the ESI scheme. This has taken the fully notified districts to 33 out of the total 38 districts in the state and the total number of insured persons in Bihar to 0.47 million and over 1.84 million beneficiaries, the ministry said.
