Here Is How To Withdraw Provident Fund (EPFO) Online Amid COVID-19
Online PF Withdrawal: The government in March this year allowed Employees' Provident Fund subscribers to withdraw non-refundable advance from their corpus in view of the deadly coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The labour ministry, in March this year, notified the grant of permission to EPF members to withdraw up to 75 per cent of the employee's contribution to the corpus or the sum of basic wages and dearness allowance for a period of three months to ease the economic fallout from the coronavirus outbreak. The amendments to the EPF scheme came into force from March 28.
PF Online Withdrawal: Here is how to withdraw provident fund (PF) online:
1. The provident fund (PF) subscriber needs to log in to the EPF scheme's member portal - unifiedportal-mem.epfindia.gov.in. This is to apply for either 75 per cent of the non-refundable advance component of an EPF account or three months of wages and dearness allowance, whichever is less.
2. Once logged in, the subscriber has to select the claim form 31 under the online services section of the website. In the next step, the user is prompted to verify the last four digits of savings bank account number linked with the PF account and click on "proceed".
3. The EPF subscriber is redirected to a withdrawal form. On the next page, the member selects the "PF Advance" form (Form 31) from the dropdown next to the text "I want to apply for".
4. In the next step, the user selects the purpose for withdrawal. The EPF portal has introduced a new option, called "outbreak of pandemic (Covid-19)", in the dropdown menu.
5. In the next step, the EPF subscriber is asked to provide a scanned copy of a cheque clearly showing the IFSC code and the account number. Only images in the JPEG format and a size between 100 Kbs and 500 Kbs are accepted.
6, The user proceeds by agreeing to the self-declaration message.
7. The member submits the request by verifying the Aadhaar number through an OTP- or One Time Passcode-based method.
8. Once the request is made, the funds are credited to the EPF subscriber's savings account within three working days, according to the EPF members' portal.
