The personal identification number, proposed by the home ministry, is likely to run into trouble once it is launched. This is because it would take into account the nature of business a person was involved in and that would keep changing, said Ajai Singh, Central Provident Fund Commissioner.

On the other hand, the national social security number, proposed by the labour ministry, would not take into consideration the nature of business and therefore would likely have wider acceptability, he said, speaking at the 5th Annual Pension Policy & Business Summit.

The NSSN is a unique number, to be assigned to each individual with an employee provident fund account. It will identify members independent of establishments and there will be only one account for each member, including for pension purposes. The EPFO has already collected data on 2,00,000 people.

The permanent account number, which the finance ministry said should be a unique number to identify each income tax payer, was an alpha-numeric number and therefore too complicated to be used, Singh said, adding that the labour ministry wanted a simple number which could be used even by semi-literate workers. While the EPFO will not cover the entire unorganised sector, a segment of it will be covered by the organisation.

Among people changing jobs frequently, a single NSSN number and EPF account would go a long way to convince them of the fact that their money would go into their account. Also, there would be no need to create a new account every time a person changed jobs.

On the long-term vision of the EPFO, Singh said it aimed to become a customer-centric organisation capable of producing a geometric growth of 20-30 per cent against the current average incremental growth of 6.6 per cent.

The organisation was working on upgrading its 283 offices to enable them to receive claims and to establish a claim settlement turnaround time of 2-3 days. Reduction of compliance costs in order to promote voluntary compliance was also a focus, he added.