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Byju’s paid pending Employees Provident Fund (EPF) dues worth ₹39.05 crore between June 26 and June 29, show EPFO data.
The data indicate that payments have been made for nine months, from September 2022 to May 2023.
On June 25, businessline reported that the ed-tech unicorn hadn’t paid the PF money to many of its former employees.
While some of them had shared screenshots of their EPF account passbooks and salary slips with businessline, data from the EPFO portal confirm that the company wasn’t compliant with the monthly deposits.
The EPFO rules mandate that a company should deposit the PF money of a month by the 15th of the subsequent month. Any delay could attract penal charges of 5-100 per cent of the actual amount.
Meanwhile, in a response to businessline’s query, Byju’s spokesperson said, “This is to confirm that there are no pending PF payments towards employees. There are no dues.” On the same day, the company made fourteen transactions to pay pending EPF dues for nine months, amounting to ₹37.79 crore.
A set of transactions were also made on June 29, according to the EPFO data updated on July 5. However, it is still unclear whether the company has cleared pending dues for all the current and former employees or not.
Also read: Byju’s promoters have sold shares worth $408.53-m in secondary deals since FY16
On June 28, sources close to Byju’s told Reuters that the company had deposited ₹123 crore following a directive issued by the EPFO and the remaining balance of ₹3.43 crore would be deposited within a couple of days.
The EPFO data show that Byju’s hasn’t been paying PF money regularly. For instance, there are instance, where employees were paid the PF money due for 2020, only in June 2023.
While the company has been in trouble for a while due to mass layoffs, delays in releasing financial reports, repayment of loans, resignations of auditors, and ED searches, Byju Raveendran, co-founder and CEO of Byju’s, assured the company’s employees at a townhall last week that things would get better soon.
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