On 7 December, 25 people lost their lives to a fire accident in a Goa night club. Twenty of them were employees, and for their families, that wasn’t the only tragedy that struck them.

The business, Birch by Romeo Lane, (also called “establishment” in provident-fund parlance) had been defaulting on its contributions to the Employee Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), failing to pay any dues for its employees.

“Securing the provident fund, pension, and insurance benefits for their families now presents a challenging task for the local EPFO office due to non-compliance by the establishment,” said a letterEPFOALetter from EPFOA to Central PF Commissioner sent by the EPF Officers’ Association to the Central PF Commissioner on 11 December. The missive, seen by The Ken, was also marked to the Minister of Labour & Employment. 

From Mohit of Jharkhand to Manojit Mal of Assam to Dominic of Maharashtra and 17 other employees, the families of these migrant workers will now have to run from pillar to post to get what is rightfully theirs—likely in vain. 

The Goa establishment’s default seems to just be the tip of the iceberg. 

The incident, stated the letter, exposes “systemic and systematic” compliance failures and reflects very poorly on the EPFO’s current compliance machinery. The implication is that thousands of employers have been defaulting, depriving millions of employees of their EPF dues.

The rot seems deep, even if the data is shallow.

While some regional PF offices sporadically releasePIBEPFO Names 9 Major Defaulters in Chhattisgarh, ₹11.25 Crore Pending names of defaulters, the EPFO does not publish a comprehensive list with the names and amounts in default. But the scale of the problem can be gauged from the “arrears management” section in its annual reports.

Between March 2019 and March 2023, the arrears by employers ballooned over 70% to over Rs 15,000 crore (over $1.6 billion). And in the next one year, it had increased another 70% to almost Rs 26,000 crore. Nearly Rs 10,000 crore of that is thanks to about 2,400 employers, each of whom had arrears of Rs 50 lakh or more.