It is always a riddle to me as why EPFO takes so much time to correct father’s name. You can almost change everything online through EPFO Portal except your father name. To correct father’s name, you have to follow a long and tedious offline process which is so frustrating that you will not be given any estimated timeline as when this will be completed. You just have to keep waiting for months, if not days. And sometimes the worst part is more than EPFO, your employer would play an important role in further delaying the whole process.

Why EPFO takes so much time to correct father’s name?

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If you are working in an organization then most probably you have to fill a Joint declaration form to correct your father’s name. You will get that form from your employer in which you have to mention your UAN (Universal Account Number), PF (Provident Fund), current incorrect father’s name and then the correct name that you want to change to. You have to sign and submit it to your employer with all the supporting documents so that they can take it to EPFO for correction. As of now, they take somewhere around 45-60 days to complete the correction.

While they ask almost all the identity proofs where your father’s name is mentioned but in those documents the most important one is Aadhaar card in which they would expect to have your father’s name mentioned. Even if you provide all the documents that have your father’s name mentioned correctly and it is not found in your Aadhaar card then they will straightaway reject your request for correction. So if you don’t have your father’s name mentioned in your Aadhar card then I would suggest you to first get it added before applying for correction or else your employer and EPFO will end up wasting your time and effort. They mandatorily need your father’s name mentioned in your Aadhaar card.

Once you submit the Joint Declaration form then you have to wait till the correction gets completed. For me, it took 4-5 months, simply because in my Aadhaar card my father’s name was not mentioned so they rejected my request. By that time, they already have wasted my 3 months as I was not getting informed anywhere about the progress and I had to do the follow up with my employer.

As I was not getting any response from my employer regarding the progress even after 3 months then I filed a RTI to get the update directly from EPFO office. Then after few days when I got the response from EPFO, I forwarded that response to my employer then only they provided me the update saying that my request was rejected due to my father’s name not mentioned in the Aadhaar card.

After that I first added my father’s name in Aadhaar card and then again followed the entire process of correction once again. This time it took little around 1 month to complete the correction.  Now that I have told you the entire process you might got an idea how painful it is to do a simple correction in EPFO through an offline process.

From what I came to know EPFO currently does not have enough resources to handle all these operations effectively. Their IT budget is quite low compared to the request they are receiving on daily basis and expecting more fund from government to serve everyone’s request in a timely manner. Why i am saying all this? It is simply to set your expectations right. Do not keep your expectations high and get disappointed later. Have some patience and pray that EPFO improve themselves in future.