PETALING JAYA: The Employees Provident Fund (EPF) has come under fire on social media after a Facebook post detailed how a cancer patient – despite being bedridden – was told to come to their office in person before she could make a withdrawal.

In the Saturday (Dec 21) post that has been shared over 8,000 times, the patient's sister, Nur Sheila Abdullah, said she was told that her sister had to be at the EPF office in person for a thumbprint scan before she could withdraw the balance from her EPF account.

Nur Sheila said that despite explaining that her 56-year-old sister was bedridden and suffering from cancer, the officer insisted that her sister had to come in person to the Johor Baru EPF office.

In her post, Nur Sheila detailed how she had gotten an ambulance and stretcher to help transport her sister to the EPF office.

"Upon arrival, we had difficulty finding a location for the ambulance to drop my sister off and we were told to use the back entrance so we would not block the front of the building.

"Only after my sister had her paperwork sorted, we found out that it was not necessary for her to come in after all," she said in the post.

Numerous Facebook users criticised EPF following the viral post.

"Your process needs to be aligned at every branches. Have a separate SOP for disable, old and critically sick. You are keeping people's hard-earned monies," AnGie Chin-Tan commented.

"EPF should have helped and attended to the customer in person, especially in critically-ill cases like this," another user Md Afrizan Bin Ariffin commented.

EPF has since issued a statement apologising for the inconvenience and uncomfortable experience Nur Sheila and her family had gone through.

It said in the statement on Sunday (Dec 22), that they have also met with the family to better understand the situation and would use this incident to "improve their current processes".