- Tuesday, May 07, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE Indian finance ministry has summoned Infosys managing director and chief executive officer Salil Parekh to explain the reasons for the continued glitches found in the new income tax portal even after two months since its launch. The portal remained unavailable for the last two days, causing inconvenience for several taxpayers in the peak season of tax returns. Parekh was set to give the explanation to Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
The new portal executed by the Bangalore-based software major was launched on June 7 but it started facing issues within hours, like inability to generate one-time passwords for Aadhaar validation, password generation glitches, problems in filing returns, etc. Indian National Congress leader Shashi Tharoor also expressed his disappointment over the matter recently, asking what was the need to start a new portal in the month of June and accused the Narendra Modi government of creating a mess.
ALSO READ: Shashi Tharoor blasts Modi government over new income tax portal: ‘Created a mess’
“Ministry of Finance has summoned Sh Salil Parekh, MD & CEO @Infosys on 23/08/2021 to explain to hon’ble FM as to why even after 2.5 months since launch of new e-filing portal, glitches in the portal have not been resolved. In fact,since 21/08/2021 the portal itself is not available,” the income tax department tweeted on Sunday (22).
Ministry of Finance has summoned Sh Salil Parekh,MD&CEO @Infosys on 23/08/2021 to explain to hon’ble FM as to why even after 2.5 months since launch of new e-filing portal, glitches in the portal have not been resolved. In fact,since 21/08/2021 the portal itself is not available.
— Income Tax India (@IncomeTaxIndia) August 22, 2021
Seven years after the tweet, Infosys said the portal was “live”. In a tweet late in the night on Sunday, Infosys said, “The emergency maintenance of the @IncomeTaxIndia portal has concluded and the portal is live. We regret any inconvenience caused to taxpayers.”
Earlier in the day, it said in another tweet, “The @IncomeTaxIndia portal continues to be under emergency maintenance. We will post an update once the portal is available again for taxpayers. We regret the inconvenience.”
The @IncomeTaxIndia portal continues to be under emergency maintenance. We will post an update once the portal is available again for taxpayers. We regret the inconvenience.
— Infosys India Business (@InfosysIndiaBiz) August 22, 2021
On Saturday (21), it tweeted saying the portal is “currently inaccessible due to planned maintenance”.
The @IncomeTaxIndia portal is currently inaccessible due to planned maintenance. We will post an update as soon as the portal is live again for taxpayers. We regret the inconvenience caused.
— Infosys India Business (@InfosysIndiaBiz) August 21, 2021
Sitharaman had tweeted within 15 hours of the launch of the new portal, “The much awaited e-filing portal 2.0 was launched last night 20:45hrs. I see in my TL grievances and glitches. Hope @Infosys & @NandanNilekani will not let down our taxpayers in the quality of service being provided. Ease in compliance for the taxpayer should be our priority.” She asked Infosys to “look into the matter” expeditiously.
The income tax department consequently had to allow manual filing of remittance forms and extended the due dates for electronic filing of forms.
On June 22, the finance minister called a meeting with important officials of Infosys to review the portal’s problems. The software company was asked to resolve the issues without further delay, improve their services and redress grievances on a priority basis.
During the meeting, Parekh, Infosys chief operating officer Pravin Rao and other company officials took note of the issues. According to the company, it had been working to fix the technical issues. It said that at least five issues — related to e-proceedings, Form 15CA/15CB, TDS statements, DSC, and viewing of past ITRs — were expected to be resolved in around a week, an official statement said. The portal, however, has continued to face issues.
Last week, Sitharaman said the technical issues in the new portal would be largely fixed over the next few days. “I have been reminding Infosys constantly, and (Infosys head) Nandan Nilekani has been messaging me with assurances that next couple of days they will sort out majority of problems,” she said.
Infosys was given the contract to develop the new tax-filing system to curb the processing time for returns from 63 days to one day, and to expedite refunds. Till June 2021, the government paid Rs 164.5 crore to the company. Before awarding it the contract for the new portal, the government and its agencies had appointed Infosys for a number of flagship information technology projects and all of them, the products had issues.
