The attitude towards employees, who actually go to an EPFO office, or try to communicate with them directly, is ‘here is somebody who wants his money, how dare he. Let us do as much as we can to trouble him or her, or the nominees, and meanwhile make merry.’ Can the EPFO be trusted completely?

Here's a question that can be answered with both 'true' and 'false', and both answers will be correct. "Do you think that one of the best savings options available in the country for the salaried class is the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) scheme?"

True: Hardly anything else gives you tax exemption at all three stages of investment, interest earned and withdrawal. The rate of interest, currently at 9.5%, is among the highest guaranteed interest rates, in this case with the backing and security of the Government of India. There is no upper limit on investment and you can make your employer match your contribution up to 12.5% of your total salary if you choose to. And finally, there appears to be a high level of computerisation and online resources, or at least a promise of the same.

False: Between the employers and the EPFO, they will try to keep the company's contribution to a minimum, by all sorts of tricks and false advice. The accounts are a mess. Interest calculation is skewed against us, the constituents/employees. Computerisation is still a distant promise. The online facilities are terribly complicated. And most of all, the EPFO is one government department which appears to be involved in all sorts of fraud, a new one every day, and from all sections and segments of society. And the pension part is totally unprotected for inflation.
 
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A few weeks ago I received information about a case where somebody had just received an EPFO slip for the FY2008-2009 that said, "DOB/DOJ is not available, please furnish the information through your employer." Since this person is now no longer working with the employer in question, he made some enquiries on his own and discovered that not only had the data for his date of birth and date of joining gone missing, but there was also some confusion and lack of data regarding his address, the spelling of his parent's name and worst of all, a total error in the spelling of the name of the nominee.

In addition, he was told verbally that since he had not come forward to correct the errors within six months of the date mentioned in the slip, which expired end-September 2009, it was assumed that the data was correct, and to change it now he would have to perform a vast variety of documentation-related activities, as well as probably genuflect multiple times at the subject EPFO office.
 
Please note, the slip for 2008-2009 was received by him from his ex-company in July 2011, which delay could have also been due to complicity between the company and the EPFO office, so there was no way this person could have even known that his personal details had suddenly gone adrift, after all these years. And the typical approach towards employees who actually go to an EPFO office, or try to communicate with them directly, is worse than in any other government or private telecom office you can think of. The attitude is that "Here is somebody who wants his money, how dare he, let us do as much as we can to trouble him or her, or the nominees, and meanwhile make merry." If s/he wants his/her money, then we will make them beg for it, is the message that comes out from behind all those citizen's charters.

Luckily there are options, in this day and age of the Right to Information Act, 2005, as well as the simple fact that the EPFO head office in Bhikaji Cama Place, New Delhi, is certainly effective in motivating correctives. But how many people use these routes? Most of them end up falling in neat traps set for them at the local EPFO offices, with the wide assortment of agents and touts who appear to flourish in that eco-system, and then get sucked into the spiral of corruption and fraud surrounding many of the EPFO offices.

So, step one is to write to your employer, or ex-employer, or the specific employer in whose name and number your personal EPFO account operates, and ask them for the following specific details:

# The latest EPFO amount in your account as applicable on 31st of March of the latest year as per their calculations.
# The latest EPFO slip if received from the EPFO, and if not received, then copies of correspondence pertaining to this delay. (By now you should have received the slips for FY 2010-2011 for amounts as of 31st March 2011.)
# Copies of personal data, nomination, DOB, DOJ and other details as filed by the company with the EPFO.
# Copies of latest Form 12A, Form 5, Form 10 and copies of challans as filed by the company with the EPFO going back to your DOJ.
# Copies of any pending investigations or queries that the EPFO has with the company.
# Copies of details of authorised signatories that the company has, and has had in the past with the EPFO.
 
Mark a copy of this letter to the relevant EPFO office that your account is in, by email as well as by registered post, and email a copy to the EPFO head office in New Delhi also. All contact details are available at their websites: http://www.epfindia.com/epfo_directory_ho.html; http://www.epfindia.com/epfo_directory_acc.html

Here it is important to point out that in all likelihood, unless the employer has a very pro-active and employee-friendly HR and accounts/F&A group, then you are not likely to receive most of this information, which is yours by right. The reality is that most companies depend on their EPFO agents, who depend on making the whole system as opaque as possible, and that there is always reason to believe that the HR/F&A/accounts people like it that way. Maybe it gives them power; maybe it is also true that frauds at EPFO simply cannot happen without participation of employers; maybe some other reason.