Centre gives Infosys a September 15 deadline to resolve glitches in Income Tax portal

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has given Infosys a September 15 deadline to resolve glitches on the Income Tax Department’s new e-filing portal. The Infosys MD&CEO Salil Parekh and other representatives from the company held two meetings on Monday after the portal was unavailable for two consecutive days.

The Income Tax, in a statement, said Parekh explained that the Infosys team is doing everything to ensure the smooth functioning of the portal. “Over 750 team members are working on this project and Pravin Rao, COO of Infosys, is personally overseeing this project. He also assured that Infosys is working expeditiously to ensure a glitch-free experience to the taxpayers on the portal,” the statement said.

The new tax portal was launched on June 7. It started to face glitches within hours of its launch. The problems included failure to link old data for past returns, inability to generate OTP for Aadhaar validation, password generation glitches and problems in filing returns etc. However, the problems have now increased and taxpayers are facing issues in interest calculation, capturing of details from Form 16 and inability to add details for tax exemption for trusts.

It highlighted that Sitharaman sought an explanation from the project vendor on the repeated issues faced by taypayers. She conveyed deep disappointment and concerns of the government and the taxpayers about the continuing glitches in the e-filing portal even after two-and-half months since its launch, which was also delayed. “Ministry of Finance emphasized that there is a need for putting in more resources and efforts on the part of Infosys so that the much delayed delivery of agreed services is ensured.”

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On Monday, Infosys tweeted that, “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.” On Sunday, it had tweeted that the portal is currently inaccessible due to planned maintenance.

Due to the ongoing glitches, the IT department had to allow manual filing of remittance forms and also extend due dates for electronic filing of forms related to intimation by pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.