EPF accounts after 2010 should be published immediately, says Harsha
View(s):Annual accounts of the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) after 2010 should be published immediately and made available to the public, particularly to EPF contributing members, an opposition parliamentarian said this week.
“We demand that these accounts be published immediately so that examinations can begin on the various allegations of fraud with the objective of bringing the alleged culprits to book to recover the stolen money,” said Harsha de Silva, the UNP’s economic spokesperson in a media statement.
He said the last set of complete audited accounts of the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) available for public scrutiny was for the year 2010. It has been tabled in Parliament and is also on the EPF website. However, audited, or for that matter even unaudited detailed accounts for the years 2011, 2012 and 2013 have not yet been made available either to the Parliament or to the public. “All that has been published in some newspapers are what is called ‘Financial Highlights’, which are clearly not detailed accounts which the EPF is obligated by law, to present at its earliest,” he noted.
The outspoken MP, who has raised issues for several months now on EPF investments in the stockmarket, said with serious allegations of fraud and resulting losses in certain EPF investments in shares, the ‘humorous statements’ being issued by them(EPF) on their accounting treatment of ‘unrealized losses’ is nothing but a tragicomedy that is being staged with no one laughing except for the suspected white collar criminals who have made it to the list of billionaires with the ‘realized profits’. “The EPF better understand that it cannot circumvent international standards in presenting its accounts,” he said.
The Rs 1.3 trillion in the EPF does not belong to the Central Bank, he said, adding that ‘it belongs to the 2.4 million hard working private sector employees who contribute part of their salary every month so that they could earn a decent return over the years and receive a significant payment at retirement in order to spend the evening of their lives without being a burden to society’.
The EPF Department of the Central Bank is only the custodian of the money. Beyond the legal requirement the EPF has a moral and an ethical obligation to produce annual accounts and present them as quickly as possible to the real owners of the money, he said.
All private banks regulated by the Central Bank have already published their detailed audited accounts even for 2013. But the EPF, managed by the Central Bank and administered by the Ministry of Labour, has not even done so for 2011. This is certainly not good economic governance, Dr. de Silva noted.