Your shares or dividends went to the IEPF, and how to get them back

A dividend that stays unclaimed for seven consecutive years moves to the Investor Education and Protection Fund automatically, and the shares that dividend was paid on move with it, under Section 124(5) of the Companies Act 2013.

One claimed dividend inside those seven years stops the clock, so the transfer only catches holdings nobody has touched at all, which is how an NRI who stopped cashing dividend warrants loses a shareholding without anyone deciding anything. Once the shares are in the Fund, Section 125 preserves your right to a refund of the shares, the dividends that went with them, and any dividend declared on them since. There is no deadline by which you have to claim.

Your claim is verified by the company, not by the Authority, and the company will not act until its registrar is satisfied you are the owner.

1. Approach the company's registrar and transfer agent with your KYC, the certificates or folio details, and signature proof. If the papers are in order the company issues an entitlement letter under Rule 7(9) of the IEPF Rules, setting out exactly what went to the Fund. 2. File web Form IEPF-5 on the MCA portal and attach that letter. The form was substituted with effect from 6 October 2025 by notification G.S.R. 733(E), and the current version asks whether an entitlement letter has been issued and lets you claim the shares only, the money only, or both. 3. Post the signed printout, the acknowledgement, a notarised indemnity bond, an advance stamped receipt and the original certificates to the company's nodal officer. 4. The company files its e-verification report with the Authority within 30 days of receiving the claim, and the Authority disposes of the claim within 60 days of that report.

One consolidated claim per company per financial year, so gather everything for that company before you file. With no entitlement letter there is nothing to attach and nothing for the nodal officer to check against. Where the shareholder has died, transmission into the heir's name comes before step one.

Start with the CIN, because that is the identifier a rename does not break. Changing a company's name needs the Registrar's approval and produces a fresh certificate of incorporation, but the 21 character CIN survives it. Paste the CIN into MCA's free View Company or LLP Master Data and you get the current name and the company status, and that status decides who can verify your claim.

With no CIN, work backwards from the register instead. Every listed company has a registrar and transfer agent, named on its investor page and in its exchange filings, and the registrars change names too: Link Intime India became MUFG Intime India on 31 December 2024. Any company that has sent amounts or shares to the Fund has to display its nodal officer's name and email address on its own website, under Rule 7(2A), and MCA's search for unclaimed and unpaid amounts and shares will show what a company has reported against an investor's name.

The CIN is not fixed in every respect: the first letter records listing status, so it changes when a company lists or delists, and two characters record the state of the registered office. The last six digits, the ROC registration number, are the part that survives everything.

You do not get the old company's shares back. You get whatever the scheme converted them into. A merger runs as a scheme of arrangement sanctioned by the NCLT under Sections 230 to 232 of the Companies Act 2013, and the scheme fixes the exchange ratio: so many shares of the surviving company for so many of the old one, tested at a record date. Five hundred shares in a company that disappeared in 2004 may be a smaller number of the buyer's shares today, plus every bonus and split declared since.

Take Anand, who finds 500 shares his father bought in 1994 and sees the company listed on MCA as amalgamated. The scheme gave three shares of the buyer for every five held, so his 500 became 300, and a one for one bonus years later took it to 600. Six hundred is what the Fund holds and what the letter has to state, not the 500 printed on the paper in his hand.

So the number on your certificate is not the number you will be credited, and an entitlement letter that simply repeats the old figure will not survive verification. The surviving company's registrar holds the mapping from the old folio to the new one, and that mapping is what the letter has to state. Where the ratio threw up a fraction, the scheme usually had a trustee sell the fractional shares and pay out cash.

None of this cost you tax at the time, and the conversion did not restart your holding period either. That is set out for mergers and demergers here, and it is the reason a holding recovered decades later is usually long term from the day it lands.

A delisted company is still a company. It still has a register, a registrar and a nodal officer, so the IEPF claim itself runs exactly as it would for a listed company. What changes is what you can do with the shares afterwards, because there is no exchange to sell them on.

If the delisting happened within the last year, the acquirer must still buy from remaining shareholders at the final delisting price, with the money held in escrow, because SEBI's delisting regulations keep that exit window open for one year from the delisting date. Shares released by the Fund inside that window can still be tendered at that price.

Outside the window, a sale is off market and privately negotiated. No securities transaction tax is paid on it, so the concessional listed equity treatment under Section 112A does not apply, the same trap that catches people tendering into a delisting or open offer.

If the company has been struck off, nobody is left to verify your claim, so it cannot complete until the company is restored. The money stays in the Fund. It just does not move.

The route back is restoration. A shareholder is a member of the company, and under Section 252(3) of the Companies Act 2013 a member may apply to the NCLT to have the company's name restored to the register, for up to twenty years from the Gazette notice of the strike off. Anyone else aggrieved by the Registrar's order has three years under Section 252(1). Restored, the company exists again, can appoint a nodal officer and can verify.

Restoration is a Tribunal proceeding, and a struck off company has no market, so the shares themselves cannot be sold even once you hold them. The real question is whether the dividend cash sitting in the Fund justifies the exercise, and MCA's search for unclaimed amounts shows what was reported against the folio, so you can size it before deciding.

The form expects an Aadhaar number from Indian nationals. An NRI or foreign national enters a passport, OCI or PIO number instead, and a form filled in wrongly here is liable to be rejected. The rule that the refund account be Aadhaar linked applies to Indian nationals, not to you.

Three more things have to be right before you file.

A demat account. Shares are released electronically, so the claim needs the full 16 digit demat ID of an account in the claimant's own name. For an NRI that means an NRO demat account, not the resident one you left behind.

An NRO bank account. The cash lands in your bank account, and for a non-resident that is the NRO account. A resident savings account you never converted cannot receive it.

Attestation. The indemnity bond and the advance stamped receipt are physical documents that have to be signed, notarised and posted to India. They can be executed before an Indian mission abroad or a local notary.

Getting the shares back is not a taxable event, because you are recovering your own asset.

The dividend cash is the part people expect to be taxed, and usually it is not. A dividend belongs to the year the company declared it, and any dividend old enough to have reached the Fund was declared before 1 April 2020, when the company paid dividend distribution tax and the shareholder's receipt was exempt under Section 10(34). The exemption follows the tax the company paid, not the date the cash finally reaches you. Dividends declared from 1 April 2020, the first ones taxable in the shareholder's own hands, only start reaching the Fund from late 2027.

Tax arises on a sale. The recovered shares keep their original cost, so the 1 April 2001 value applies to anything bought before then and, for listed equity, the gain up to 31 January 2018 is grandfathered (Section 112A). Long term gains are 12.5% above the ₹1.25 lakh exemption, and the buyer side withholds under Section 195.