As the deadline of filing Income Tax Returns (ITRs) for the assessment year 2024-25 approaches, taxpayers continue to cite technical issues while filing returns with the e-filing portal, which was developed by Infosys.
Chartered Accountants (CAs) have expressed “dismay” over facing several difficulties during the ITR filing process on the income tax portal, which includes accessing essential forms, such as 26AS, Annual Information Statement (AIS), and Tax Information Summary (TIS); encountering mismatches in pre-filled data related to salary and interest income; and facing technical glitches while submitting the returns. The last date for filing the ITR for FY24 is July 31.
As of July 14, over 27 million ITRs were filed, which is 13% more compared to returns filed during the same period last year. The number of ITRs filed per day has crossed 1.3 million on July 13, and is increasing everyday as the due date of 31st July 2024 is approaching, the Income Tax Department said in a bulletin.
Earlier this week, many CAs expressed their displeasure with the e-filing portal on X (formerly Twitter), where they tagged Infosys-Co-founder Narayana Murthy on their posts, and asked him to deploy the Infosys’ team to work at least “one-hour” per week to ensure the portal runs “smoothly”.
Infosys developed the income tax portal– which provides a single window access to the income tax related services for taxpayers and other stakeholders – in 2021. Initially, the portal was primarily used for filing tax returns, but over the past few years, its functionalities have expanded significantly to include payment of taxes, filing of TDS returns, responding to notices, attending proceedings, and filing appeals.
However, CAs say the portal has technical issues, such as continuous buffering, which hinders the completion of form filling. They say that error messages often appear during the filing process, which delays the successful submission of returns. Another significant problem is the non-receipt of One Time Passwords (OTPs) required for authentication, which prevents verification and submission of returns.
Moreover, taxpayers frequently experience difficulties logging in. The portal often displays errors during login attempts and sometimes logs users out in the middle of a session, leading to unsaved forms and loss of data.
Further, after filing the ITR, the portal often generates errors during return processing, which can result in incorrect demands or reduced refunds. Taxpayers then have to repeatedly follow up to rectify these issues, mention CAs.
Some taxpayers also face issues where their tax payments are not updated on the portal. Even after making payments, the system continues to show the challan as unpaid, preventing the taxpayer from filing their return, said Ankit Jain, partner, Ved Jain & Associates.
Hence, to address these issues and enhance the functionality of the e-filing portal, the government should enhance infrastructure and server capacity of the portal to manage high traffic volumes, especially during peak filing periods. “This includes increasing server capacity and optimising performance to handle the increased load from additional functionalities,” said Jain.
Prateek Bansal, partner, White & Brief – Advocates & Solicitors said that timelines for filing ITRs should be extended, backend system should be improved and robustly integrated to fetch accurate data for Form 26AS and pre-filled data, and advisories for situations where OTPs are not received for submission or verification of returns should be issued, to enhance functionality of the portal.