New Delhi: Hopeful of a buoyant recovery and timely completion of Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) of Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), Labour Minister Sahib Singh Verma on July 8 expressed confidence that 9.5 per cent EPF interest could be maintained next year, in spite of falling interest rates.

"May be next year too, we will be able to maintain 9.5 per cent interest," Verma told reporters, adding that the EPFO had been able to give the rate in 2003 due to handsome recovery in the recent past (a nine-fold increase over that in the 1990s).

He said once the BPR was complete, the accounts would be credited instantaneously and could save upto Rs 100 crore a year in interest income by avoiding delays.

He said he was confident that the EPFO could recover over Rs 1,511 crore through its new action packed recovery strategy 'Compliance 04' and to that extent there would be increase in the income for the organisation, enabling it to pass that on to over 3.2 crore subscribers.

At present, the investment income (or corpus) of the EPFO stands at over Rs 1,40,000 crore with 80 per cent of it in the Special Deposit Scheme, in which further investments had been terminated from June by the Finance Ministry.

The Central Board of Trustees of EPFO had recently cut the interest by 0.5 per cent, while doling out a Golden Jubilee year bonus of 0.5 per cent, thus virtually maintaining the EPF interest at 9.5 per cent for this financial year.

The surplus left with EPFO after paying out 9.5 per cent has been projected at Rs 25 crore in 2003-04, as compared to over Rs 160 crore in the previous year.

PTI