The IT systems of India’s largest retirement fund, the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), are in a virtual logjam, and efforts to flag software and hardware deficiencies triggering incessant crashes over the past two and a half years have been ignored by its top brass, its officers conveyed to Labour and Employment Minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Friday.

Seeking the minister’s immediate attention on their “escalating frustration” with EPFO’s creaking IT systems that make it a challenge for staffers to process millions of workers’ PF and pension claims, the EPF Officers’ Association has cautioned that a “continued denial” of the problem will only exacerbate the situation and hinder remedial efforts.

“Over the past 30 months, we have consistently brought to the attention of the CPFC [Central PF Commissioner] the ongoing critical issues affecting the EPFO’s IT infrastructure. This engagement was undertaken with the expectation of prompt remedial action. Unfortunately, our concerns have been met with a consistent lack of acknowledgment,” the association has written in a missive to the minister reviewed by The Hindu.

“The situation has now turned grave with officers and offices reporting serious system deficiencies on a daily basis... In recent times, the software has exhibited significant instability, characterised by recurrent outages. Over the past several weeks, the application’s performance deteriorated markedly, manifesting in frequent system slowdowns, involuntary user logout and complete system failures,” the association said.

“Previously, EPFO management attributed the software’s performance issues to concurrent user logins. However, the situation has escalated to a critical juncture where system crashes and slowdowns occur even in the absence of heavy user traffic. It has been observed that field offices have reported system failures during off-peak hours as well.

Mooting a comprehensive evaluation of EPFO’s application software by leading industry experts and an urgent overhaul of IT systems, its staffers said the current state of affairs has made it a “formidable challenge” for most PF offices to process claims even within 20 days, although their performance indicators have been tweaked to measure field-level performance on the basis of claims settled within 10 days.

“The exigency of a comprehensive overhaul of the EPFO Application Software has been apparent for quite some time now. Despite this critical need, the implementation of such an overhaul has been repeatedly postponed for reasons that remain obscure,” the officers’ body lamented, pointing to the rapid technological system shifts undertaken by the Income Tax department, for instance. “This discrepancy suggests a systemic failure to acknowledge the gravity of the situation,” it added.

Field offices have resorted to extraordinary measures, including weekend and holiday operations, to try and settle claims when there is a lower load on the system. “It is reasonable to speculate that the claim settlement process would be exponentially accelerated with a fully functional software system,” the EPFOA underlined.

Last July, the EPFOA had written to then Labour Minister Bhupender Yadav, raising similar concerns about EPFO’s IT systems. The labour minister chairs the EPFO’s board of trustees, which had endorsed recommendations of an ad-hoc panel on IT issues at a meeting in March 2022. “Unfortunately, no progress has been made on implementation of the recommendations,” the EPFOA had said last year.