SC flags "worrisome" private access to EPFO, ITR data
The Supreme Court on Monday, August 24, asked the Centre to consider putting in place safeguards to prevent misuse of sensitive Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) and Income Tax Return (ITR) data by private entities, calling such access "worrisome."
A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana made the observation while declining to entertain a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by Piyush Sharma on the matter.
The bench flagged the growing presence of a commercial technology ecosystem that allegedly accesses, retrieves and verifies personal information from provident fund and income tax records, and said the issue largely falls under policy but termed the private access to such sovereign data as concerning.
The court suggested that the Centre work with domain experts to devise an effective mechanism to tackle the problem, and directed the government to take "necessary steps to prevent misuse of individual data by private enterprises."
The PIL had contended that private entities were accessing and commercially exploiting personal data that individuals are statutorily required to furnish to government authorities.
According to the petitioner, a personal inquiry showed that submitting only his Permanent Account Number (PAN) and Universal Account Number (UAN) to a private verification workflow was enough to retrieve his complete employment history linked to those identifiers, without any OTP generation, explicit consent or visible authorisation-based identity check.
Sharma clarified that he was not alleging any data leak by government agencies. Instead, he pointed to what he called the insecure status of information submitted to authorities under various laws, arguing that this data could later be accessed by private players in the absence of adequate safeguards.
The petitioner told the court that despite the statutory framework governing EPFO and income tax data, an emerging pattern had surfaced in which private employment verification systems were relying on such statutory records for purposes including employment verification, moonlighting detection, dual employment screening, labour market profiling and employment-related decision-making.
(Inputs from PTI)