- Sunday, May 19, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
FORMER Indian Union minister Shashi Tharoor on Tuesday (6) slammed the Narendra Modi government over the new income tax portal saying that even after spending Rs 4,200 crore ($565 million) on it, it could not be made into a user-friendly one. He accused the government of creating a “mess” instead.
Tharoor, an Indian National Congress member of the Lok Sabha from the southern state of Kerala and the president of the All India Professionals’ Congress, said chartered accountants in the unit complained to him that the changes made to the portal have been disastrous with glitches, including delayed logging time.
Tharoor said almost all features of the new portal are not operational and hence works like filing of income tax returns and data preparation for appeals have been hit.
“Not clear why the government chose to change the income tax portal in June. Would have been wiser just before the end of the Financial Year or the start of the next one, so that taxpayers eligible for income-tax refund could have received help in these difficult times,” he said.
What was the need for a new portal, asks Tharoor
The senior opposition leader also criticised the government saying what was the need for a new income tax portal when the old one has been running smoothly for years and why the portal was switched at a time when income tax-payers usually file their returns and claim refunds. He also asked why no testing of the new portal was done before launching.
“The rationale for a new portal is to provide a more user-friendly, modern and seamless experience to users,” the parliamentarian said.
Tharoor posted a series of tweets on the matter and said in one of them, “even after spending ₹4200cr on its renovation, the Govt has failed to attain the objective & created a mess instead. This is a replay of the chaos w/the GST portal.”
He said in another tweet that while India has very few taxpayers per capita and a “culture of tax evasion and black money”, this must be for the first time in history that Indian taxpayers who want to pay their taxes are not able to do so because the income tax portal is not working.
“Penalties should be imposed and heads roll,” he said.
Tharoor’s remarks came a day after the income tax department extended the deadline for manual filing of forms related to foreign remittances till July 15.
The new portal was launched on June 7 and the tax department as well as the government said that it was aimed at making compliance more taxpayer-friendly.
However, as the website faced glitches from the very first day, Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had asked Infosys — the vendor who developed the site — to fix the issues on priority. Infosys officials said that they were working to fix the technical issues and some of the issues had already been fixed.
