A company with offices in both Lahore and Karachi cannot use one social security registration for both. This surprises a lot of business owners who assume compliance is a single national rule, similar to EOBI. It is not. Provincial social security institutions are separate systems with separate registrations.
The provincial split
Employees working in Punjab are registered under PESSI, the Punjab Employees Social Security Institution. Employees working in Sindh fall under SESSI, the Sindh Employees Social Security Institution. Other provinces run their own equivalent bodies. Each operates independently, with its own registration process and its own contribution handling, even though the underlying purpose, providing health and social security benefits to employees, is similar across all of them.
Where multi-province companies get this wrong
The common mistake is treating one province's registration as sufficient for a company's entire workforce. A company headquartered in Lahore that opens a Karachi office sometimes assumes their existing PESSI registration covers the new employees. It does not. Employees working in Sindh need to be registered under SESSI specifically, based on where they actually work, not where the company is headquartered.
This gets more complicated with remote or field employees who may be based in a different province than the company's registered office. The correct registration follows the employee's actual work location, which requires an accurate, up to date record of where each person is based.
Why this matters beyond compliance
Beyond the legal requirement, incorrect provincial registration means an employee's contributions may not be properly credited toward the benefits they are entitled to in their actual province of employment. This becomes the employee's problem at the exact moment they try to access those benefits, often long after the registration error was made.
Managing this without losing track
For a company with employees across multiple provinces, tracking which institution each person is registered under, and confirming that registration happened correctly for every new hire, is not something to manage from memory or a general spreadsheet. Each employee's record needs to reflect their actual province of employment, and the registration workflow needs to route to the correct institution automatically based on that.
When this is built into onboarding rather than handled as a manual afterthought, adding an employee in a new province does not require your HR team to research the correct process each time. The system already knows which institution applies based on where the employee is recorded as working.
Book a demo if you operate across more than one province and want to see how registration is handled per employee location in Workflow Engine.
Adnan Khan
HR Lead, Bitsbuffer
Adnan leads HR operations and business development for Workflow Engine. He writes about Pakistani HR compliance, payroll, and workflow automation from direct operational experience.