new delhi the labour ministry has said that all private provident fund trusts have to compulsorily match the interest rate of 95 declared by the employees provident fund organisation epfo for the ongoing fiscal as it was one of the conditions for the exemption given to them they have no option they have to give 95 interest this year labour secretary p c chaturvedi told et if they cannot do so their exemptions will be canceled he said the epfo declared a 1 higher interest for 201011 based on rs 1731crore surplus fund discovered in its interest account that had accumulated over the years and had not been credited to subscribers accounts a number of employers led by the employers federation of india opposed the decision on the ground that they did not have reserves left to fund the gap between their expected earnings of 85 and the 95 rate the labour ministry has agreed to examine the accounts of the 40 private provident fund trusts surveyed by employers organisations which they claim cannot afford to pay out 95 interest the purpose behind the exercise however is not to allow them to pay a lower interest rate but to find out why their finances are in a bad state we have asked our field officers to carry out a study which will also tell us how these private trusts are managing the funds mr chaturvedi said the ministry wants to examine whether these funds have been actually earning lower interest rates than that declared by the epfo over the years and if that is the case then are they in a position to continue maintaining these accounts the idea behind allowing companies to manage their own provident fund money was to give them an opportunity to earn higher interest rates for their workers if that is not the case then the entire idea is defeated mr chaturvedi said there are about 2750 establishments which include companies like tata hcl wipro coca cola and lt that manage their own epf accounts and are exempt from the supervision of the epfo but they have to follow investment norms laid down by the epfo and also have to match their interest rates the private trusts have an estimated 48 lakh subscribers and a corpus of over rs 1 lakh crore