Getting shares back from the IEPF

People are told their shares have gone to the IEPF and hear it as a loss. It is not. It is a transfer. The company was required to make it, the Authority holds the shares and the dividends until somebody claims them, and there is no time limit after which the entitlement lapses.

What makes these claims hard is not entitlement. It is that a claim has to satisfy two different bodies, in a fixed order, on documents describing a shareholding that may have been created before the claimant was born.

How the shares got there

A dividend that stays unclaimed for seven consecutive years takes the underlying shares with it. That is the mechanism, and the consequence people miss is that the trigger is the dividend rather than the shares. A shareholder who never sold anything, never moved and simply stopped banking small dividend warrants can lose the register entry along with them.

The most common reasons a dividend stops arriving are mundane: a change of address the registrar was never told about, a bank account that closed, a signature that no longer matches, a name that changed on marriage, a death that was never notified to the company.

The change that matters: the entitlement letter

The Ministry of Corporate Affairs substituted Form IEPF-5 with effect from 6 October 2025. The most consequential change is that the form now requires an entitlement letter issued by the concerned company or bank, uploaded with the claim.

This reorders the work. Under the old form a claimant could file first and let the company verify afterwards. Now the company has to be brought to the table before the Authority sees the file at all, which means every name, permanent account number, signature and bank mismatch has to be cleared with the registrar first rather than argued about later.

The Authority is not usually what delays an IEPF claim. The company is, and the entitlement letter is now the gate it stands at.

The sequence that works

• Establish what actually moved. The folio or client identifier, the certificate numbers, which years of dividend are involved, and every bonus issue, split, rights offer, merger and demerger in between. A claim for the wrong number of shares comes back.
• Clear the register first. Update know your customer details with the registrar, resolve any signature mismatch, and settle the succession position if the holder has died. Do this before asking for anything.
• Obtain the entitlement letter from the company or bank.
• File Form IEPF-5 with the indemnity bond, advance receipt and affidavit in the prescribed formats, and send the originals to the company's nodal officer.
• Follow the company's e-verification report. This is the step that starts the clock: the Authority is required to dispose of a claim within sixty days of receiving that report. A company that does not file it holds the clock still indefinitely.
• Take delivery. Shares are credited to a demat account and money to a bank account, so both have to be open and correctly recorded before the claim is allowed rather than after.

Where claims fail

Almost never on entitlement. Overwhelmingly on four things: no entitlement letter, because the company was approached before the record was clean; a deceased holder with no settled succession position, which the Authority will not decide; shares and dividend claimed separately, when they travelled together and should be claimed together; and a bank account the refund cannot reach, which sends a sanctioned claim back into the queue.

Deficiency letters are answerable, and they are the point at which most self-filed claims are abandoned. They are terse, they do not always explain the underlying problem, and filing the same claim again does not fix anything.

Should you do it yourself

If you hold the certificates, the folio is in your own name, your identity documents match it, the registrar answers email and nobody has died, then yes. The Authority charges the claimant no filing fee, the form is public, and you should not pay anybody for it.

The reasons to get help are all the same reason: something in the chain between the person and the holding is broken. A company that will not issue the letter. A signature that no longer matches. Forty year old physical certificates through three corporate actions. A succession nobody ever documented. Those are days of work, and they are the work.

One thing worth doing today

If a relative has died in the last decade and held shares, check whether the holding has already gone to the IEPF before you start a transmission. Seven years passes quietly. A family that begins a transmission on a holding that moved in 2019 is preparing the wrong claim, and will have to prepare the succession documents again for the Authority.