3 EPFO officials booked in Rs2.7-cr pension scam

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 11

The CBI has registered a corruption and cheating case against three officials of the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) for allegedly siphoning off Rs 2.71 crore between March 2020 and June 2021, when the organisation had relaxed the norms for withdrawals amid job losses due to Covid lockdown.

Officials in the CBI said the case was registered on the basis of a complaint from the vigilance department of the EPFO. They said the “kingpin” of the alleged scam was Chandan Kumar Sinha, a senior social security assistant in the Kandivali regional office, and Uttam Tagaray and Vijay Jarpe, both assistant provident fund commissioners in Coimbatore and Chennai regional offices, respectively. According to the CBI FIR, a copy of which is with The Tribune, the vigilance department of the EPFO had learnt about the alleged scam on May 18 following an anonymous tip-off.

Soon after, the department started an internal audit that revealed that crores had been siphoned off from the pension fund corpus through manipulation of the system by insiders, the officials said. They said based on the revelations, the EPFO filed the complaint with the CBI on August 24.

According to the complaint, the accused knew the system and its loopholes well and used the data of migrant workers to defraud the organisation during the pandemic.

“The modus operandi of the racket included creating bogus PF accounts using bank account and Aadhaar collected from migrant workers and poor people for which they paid a small commission. They then portrayed them as employees of companies shut down in the wake of the pandemic and withdrew the amount by filing fake claims,” it said.