CBI Detects Fraud In EPFO During Internal Probe, Case Filed Against 3 Officials

New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has filed a case against the officials of the Employees Provident Fund Organisation after a scam was detected. As of now, 91 Provident Fund accounts are under the CBI scanner.

The CBI has filed a case against 3 officials of the EPFO for siphoning off around Rs. 2.71 crores. Further investigations on this case are now underway. 

The CBI has discovered 91 false accounts inside the EPFO in Mumbai. The case was registered after the Vigilance Department of the Employees Provident Fund Organisation filed a complaint.

It has also been revealed that the adhaar card details for few poor migrants were used during the pandemic to create such accounts for an exchange of Rs. 10,000. Using these details, the PF accounts were created. All of the fraudulent settlements were done with the help of few employees of the Employees Provident Fund Organisation. 

The scam has taken place all over India and not only in Mumbai. As per the statements made by CBI, it has been revealed that the scam could be as big as Rs. 21 crores.

The time in which the fraudulent activity has taken place is somewhere between March 2020 and June after the withdrawal norms were relaxed in view of job losses during the pandemic.

The 'brain' of this scam is revealed to be a senior Social Security Assistant, Chandan Kumar Sinha, of the Kandivali Regional office. The other two officials have been identified as Uttam Tagaray and Vijay Jarpe, both Assistant Provident Fund Commissioners of Coimbatore and Chennai regional offices, respectively.

The scam was first detected by the Vigilance Department of the Employees Provident Fund Organisation on May 18 after receiving a tip-off from an anonymous person. This was followed by an internal audit in which it was revealed that crores had been siphoned off from the Pension Fund corpus. This was done by the manipulation of the system by the insiders of the organisation who knew the loopholes in the system very well. 

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