EPFO trustees to appoint new fund managers on March 31

Retirement fund body EPFO is likely to appoint fund managers for a three-year term starting April 1 at its trustees' meet scheduled on March 31.
Asset management firms ICICI Securities Primary Dealership, Reliance Capital AMC and HSBC AMC have emerged as top bidders for managing the huge corpus of the EPFO.
The body has a corpus of over Rs 6.5 lakh crore and it is expected to get an incremental deposit of Rs 80,000 crore during this fiscal.
The other shortlisted bidders among the six asset management firms are UTI AMC, ICICI Prudential and Birla Sun Life AMC.
The Employees Provident Fund Organisation's (EPFO) apex decision making body, the Central Board of Trustees (CBT), will deliberate on the proposal to appoint appropriate number of fund managers to manage its corpus selected through bidding process and allocate funds amongst them, the agenda listed for the meeting said.

The CBT, headed by the Labour Minister, has already nominated SBI as its fund manager and the Board had approved its appointment for the purpose during the last meeting of trustees held on March 11.

SBI had also participated in the bidding process, which started on December 9.
During the last CBT meeting held on March 11, the trustees had entrusted the Chairman to appoint appropriate number of fund managers based on the bidding ranking and recommendation of the Finance Investment and Audit Committee.
The CBT will also deliberate on the draft bill for comprehensive amendments of the Employees' Provident Funds & Miscellaneous Provisions Act 1952.

The proposed bill seeks to change the definition of wages for clubbing all allowance paid to workers in cash. This will increase the PF contributions paid by employees as well as employers.
Besides, the bill also provides that Centre can reduce or waive PF contributions by certain class of employees. However, employers would continue to contribute towards the social security schemes run by the EPFO, as per the draft bill.