The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has introduced a Universal Account Number (UAN) generation and activation using Aadhaar Face Authentication Technology (FAT) through the UMANG Mobile App.

This contactless service marks a major leap in providing hassle-free and fully digital experiences to crores of EPFO members.

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Notably, 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 introduced two key changes, removing the requirement to upload an 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 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.

Until now, UANs were largely generated by employers using employee data submitted to EPFO. While Aadhaar details were validated, inaccuracies in fields such as father’s name, mobile number, or date of birth were common.

These errors often required corrections during claim processing or while accessing other EPFO services. In many cases, the UAN was not even communicated to the employee, and mobile numbers were missing or incorrect, making direct communication difficult.

Furthermore, UAN activation through Aadhaar OTP validation on the EPFO Member portal was a separate process to be completed by the member causing confusion.

According to the data shared by the Ministry of Labour & Employment, in the financial year 2024-25 alone, out of 1.26 crore UANs allotted, only 44.68 lakh (35.30%) were activated by members.

Several reminders were given to employers to get employees to activate their UAN using Aadhaar OTP so that in future any benefit under the Employment Linked Scheme could be potentially provided using DBT, it said.

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.