EPFO officials expressed concern over IT infrastructure, need for upgrade and improvement

The Employees Provident Fund Officers Association is seeking the intervention of the Union Labour Minister to improve the Information Technology infrastructure of the retirement fund body.

The EPF Officers Association, in its letter to the minister on Monday, mentioned that it has been regularly sending representations to the minister through for immediate intervention in upgrading the EPF IT system – software, hardware, IT manpower – which is putting heavy pressure on EPF manpower and badly affecting EPFO ​​​services.

The association said the situation has now turned grim with officers and offices reporting critical system deficiencies day in and day out. It said the inadequacy of EPFO ​​IT systems and ensuing service disruption is adversely affecting the EPF services.

As EPFO application software is the basic module of its service delivery infrastructure, hence, it becomes imperative to update the same in light of the emerging requirements on a continuous basis, explained the organization. It is the primary platform through which our field office members process and adjudicate claims.

Of late, the software has become extremely unstable, with frequent disruptions. The performance of the application has been degrading over the past few weeks; this can be viewed from frequent system slowdowns, involuntary user logouts, and complete systems failure. Earlier, the EPFO ​​management had attributed the software performance problems to concurrent user logins.

It said the situation had reached a critical juncture where the system crashes and slows down even when there is not heavy user traffic. Field offices have been found to report system failures even during off-peak hours.

It said that the need for overall revamping of the EPFO ​​application software has been felt for quite a long time. In spite of this critical need, such revamping has been postponed again and again for reasons that remain obscure.

Whereas the EPFO is a financially sound organization not dependent upon the governmental administrative funding, still on the other hand, the fact that the 2.0 version of the application software contrastingly stays far from implementation reflects quite rapid technological progress made by other departments like the Income Tax Department. This reflects an anomaly to systemic failure in acknowledging the gravity of the situation pointed out by the EPFOA.

Any technical challenge has been vehemently denied, and the alleged progress has been emphasized. It is reasonable to expect that exponential acceleration in the process of claim settlement with a fully functional software system is on its way.

In the letter, the EPFOA has respectfully drawn the attention of the Minister to the growing sense of frustration being felt by officers and staff of the EPFO ​​in view of persistent deficiencies in application software and alleged unresponsive attitude of the upper management. It suggested that there is a need for a thorough examination of the software by lead experts in the industry to identify the root cause of the problems and formulate a modern software solution that befits the stature of EPFO as the world's largest social security organisation. The body said, "Over the last thirty months, we have consistently brought to the notice of CPFC the critical issues affecting EPFO's IT infrastructure.".