Press Statement

IJU protests against tax on EPF withdrawals

03 Mar, 2016

The Indian Journalists Union (IJU) strongly protested against taxing 60 percent of the accumulated amount in the Employees Provident Fund at the time of withdrawal from 1 April 20016 terming it as retrograde and anti-employee measure. Presently the withdrawal of accumulated EPF corpus is tax free. This would affect more than 6.6 crore EPF subscribers in the country.

In a statement issued here on Tuesday, the Indian Journalists Union (IJU) President S N Sinha and Secretary-General Amar Devulapalli said the threshold limit of Rs. 15 thousand for imposing tax, was meaningless for the working journalists as the minimum wage recommended by the Majithia Wage Board is about eighteen thousand rupees at current price level.

“The Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who is also the Information and Broadcasting Minister, spoke about converting the country into ‘Pension Society’, choose to attack the life time savings of the salaried class to force them to choose other pension schemes by bringing it into tax net on par with them. It is ironic that while he spoke of the government paying the contribution of employers contribution to the EPF for new employees for the first three years on one hand, he wants to discourage saving in this scheme by bringing 60 percent of the corpus at the time of withdrawal into tax net.

“We demand that the Finance Minister should withdraw the proposal to tax EPF withdrawals as it affects the social security net of the salaried class. If the Government persists it with the proposal, the working journalists in the country would join protest actions of the other sections of salaried class”, the IJU leaders S N Sinha and Amar Devulapalli warned.