Filing income tax returns earlier took about 63 days, which the government wanted to reduce to only one day, along with fast tracking the refund processes.
In order to achieve this, the government awarded the Bengaluru-based tech giant Infosys with the contract of developing the next-generation income tax website in 2019.
However, right since its launch on June 7, 2021, the new income tax portal was marred with multiple technical glitches and in some cases, missing or non-functional forms and certificates on the website.
This led to the finance ministry conducting a meeting headed by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on June 22 to review and resolve the listed issues, with ministry members and officials from Infosys.
Despite the detailed meeting, the portal continued to present technical challenges, in addition to absence of certain functionalities.
Regarding this, Infosys has come forth and acknowledged all the complaints and issues addressed by taxpayers and various stakeholders, regarding the problems faced on the new I-T portal.
It has informed the Parliament on Tuesday, of mitigating some glitches like speed issues and performance of the website, along with issues of not being able to find certain functionalities on the platform.
Infosys Acknowledges Glitches on New I-T Portal
The new income tax portal launched on June 7 was full of technical glitches and non-availability of some essential forms and functions.
Even after a detailed discussion between the finance ministry and the website developer Infosys on resolving the issues, multiple glitches continued to pertain.
Chartered accountants, overseas firms and multiple taxpayers lodged complaints while using the website to file income tax returns.
Key utilities like e-proceedings and digital signature certificates are complained about not being functional.
On Tuesday, Infosys informed Parliament that it had reduced the volume of the existing issues on the website, like speed related problems and absence of some important functions.
The Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary said that over 700 e-mails detailing over 2,000 issues including 90 unique issues/problems in the portal were received from various stakeholders including Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), tax professionals and taxpayers, states Moneycontrol.
“Infosys has acknowledged the technical issues in the functioning of the portal and have informed that technical issues…are continuously being resolved. Some of the initial issues experienced by taxpayers regarding slowness of the portal, non-availability of certain functionalities or technical issues in functionalities have been mitigated,” added Chaudhary.