Complaints regarding discrepancy in account statements filed by mutual fund investors have increased by about 56 per cent in 2010-11. However, for the same period, the total number of investor complaints under all categories declined by 74 per cent.

Of the total 12 categories of complaints, only two categories recorded a hike in their numbers – Discrepancy in Statement of Accounts and Deviation from Scheme Attributes.

According to data on the Association of Mutual Funds in India (AMFI) Web site, the number of complaints registered under the category “Discrepancy in Statement of Accounts” moved from 13,784 in 2009-10 to 21,594 in 2010-11.

Fund houses that have seen a rise in the number complaints over the previous year under this category include HDFC Mutual Fund, Reliance Mutual Fund, DSP Blackrock, UTI Mutual Fund and Tata Mutual Fund.

One of the reasons for the sharp increase in complaints under this category is due to changes in SEBI regulation, said fund house officials. Before 2010, only written complaints duly signed by customers were considered as complaints. After a SEBI circular in May 2010, any request by investors through calls at call centres or branch offices, through walk-ins, emails or through Web sites were to be taken into account as complaints, they said.

Another reason for the increase, fund house officials said, was the subjectivity involved in the classification of these complaints.

“‘Discrepancy in statement of account' refers to discrepancies in personal details of the customer such as name, PAN number, email id etc which could occur due to many reasons such as difficulty in understanding handwriting during data entry, and so on. Customers report these discrepancies to us to be corrected,” said a Reliance Mutual Fund spokesperson in response to an email query. However, other fund house officials added that even doubt or clarification pertaining to SIP account statements, NAV details or any such detail which is not understood by the investor can also be considered a discrepancy in account statements.

The confusion arises because another category “Non-updation of changes viz. address, PAN, bank details, nomination, etc” is ideally supposed to represent complaints regarding changes in name, address, phone number or PAN and other such details. “Often fund houses, at their discretion, place such complaints under the head of ‘Discrepancy in Statement of Accounts' as these also appear in the statement of accounts and any complaints against these are also discrepancies in account statement,” said a fund house official.

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