The Employees Provident Fund Organization (EPFO) has made a major change in the process of creating and activating Universal Account Number (UAN) from August 1, 2025. Now, UAN will be issued only through Face Authentication Technology (FAT) through the UMANG app. This rule applies to all new employees.

More than 1,000 recruitments were stopped in two days.
The Indian Staffing Federation (ISF) says that this change has immediately affected the recruitment process. Onboarding of more than 1,000 candidates stopped in just two days. This not only affected the payroll, but also PF contributions and other compliance deadlines were in danger.

Big challenges facing companies
According to ISF, staffing companies have a large number of temporary employees, and joining and exiting are frequent here. The FAT process requires personal participation of every employee, but many do not have a smartphone or a reliable internet connection. This leads to a delay in the generation of UAN, which has a direct impact on salary payments and PF contributions, especially in MSME and high turnover sectors. Technical difficulties are also becoming a big problem. Failing face recognition, server down, or poor quality of camera and network, all these reasons are making it difficult to implement FAT at the ground level.

Threat to compliance deadline
EPFO has set a deadline of 30 June 2025 for Aadhaar linking and FAT. This deadline is a big challenge for companies managing thousands of employees. Failure to comply on time may result in a penalty, or PF contribution can be stopped, which will affect both the employer and the employee. ISF says that many employees' Aadhaar mobile number is not updated, or there is a difference in biometrics. In such a situation, successful face authentication is not possible.

ISF gave suggestions
Keeping in mind the objectives of EPFO, ISF has suggested some solutions.

For first-time job seekers, employers should be allowed to create a UAN through their portals so that PF registrations can be done on time.

A six-month exemption should be given for digital onboarding and FAT awareness so that companies can train employees and the process is simplified.

The facility of creating bulk UAN without instant FAT or Aadhaar seeding should be restored as before, so that there is no delay in PF contribution.

Dedicated support should be available for technical issues related to FAT and the EPFO portal should be able to handle high traffic.

Partial exemption or simplified compliance process should be made for high turnover industries and staffing companies.

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