Govt Of India Summons Infosys CEO Over Income Tax Portal Issues: Severe Client Escalation!

Almost 80 days after the launch of the new income tax portal on June 7, 2021, the website continues to be marred with technical glitches. It currently remains unavailable for two straight days starting August 21.

In order to explain the delay in resolving the glitches on the portal despite having a detailed meeting with the officials of Infosys on June 22, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has summoned the CEO and MD of tech giant Infosys, Salil Parekh on Monday regarding this issue.

Right since its launch on June 7, the new income tax portal was marred with multiple technical glitches and in some cases, missing or reporting non-functional forms and certificates.

In order to do away with the errors immediately, the finance ministry conducted a meeting headed by FM Sitharaman on June 22 to review and resolve the listed issues, with ministry members and officials from Infosys.

While it was expected that all the pending issues would fully resolve shortly after the June 22 meeting, there still seems to persist some technical challenges and glitches on the income tax website, though a lot lower in volume.

Sitharaman Calls Infy CEO to Address IT Portal Glitches

FM Nirmala Sitharaman has summoned Infosys CEO & MD Salil Parekh on Monday, to explain the reason behind continued glitches on the income tax portal, even after over two month of the portal’s launch.

The Government awarded Infosys with a contract to develop the next-generation income tax filing system in 2019, to expedite the process of filing income tax returns from 63 days to one day, by introducing the new income tax portal.

However, the portal developed by the Indian tech giant showed multiple problems right since the first day of launch.

Key utilities like e-proceedings and digital signature certificates were reported to not be functional on the website, while multiple complaints were lodged by chartered accountants, overseas firms and taxpayers, regarding glitches while filing IT returns.

As a result, the income tax 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.

The I-T department tweeted, “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.”

Infosys Fails to Deliver for GOI’s Project for the 2nd Time

After the official meeting on June 22, the Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary  stated that officials from Infosys acknowledged the technical issues in the functioning of the portal and informed that they were continuously working towards resolving these issues.

“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.

However, some glitches continue to pertain.

Infosys India Business, regarding this matter tweeted, “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”.

Furthermore, this is not the first time Infosys has failed to deliver/timely deliver properly functioning services to a Government of India’s projects.

Earlier, the Bengaluru-based giant had also developed the GST Network (GSTN) portal, used for GST payment and return filing. The software major had faced flak for slow functioning of the GSTN portal.

Stating this, the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Senior Advisor, Kanchan Gupta, tweeted, “This is the second major GoI project @Infosys has messed up. The first was #GST portal. Now it is #IncomeTax portal. Infosys bags GoI projects using L1 route which limits options Clearly lacks either capacity or intent to deliver. Two ‘failures’ in a row cannot be coincidence”.