After persisting technical glitches and even non-availability of the income tax e-filing portal since Saturday, vendor Infosys CEO Salil Parekh has been summoned on Monday to explain to finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman as to why the portal continues to malfunction, seriously affecting service delivery to taxpayers.
“The 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.
On June 8, a day after the new website was launched, Sitharaman had informed Infosys about the technical difficulties being faced by taxpayers. On June 22, Sitharaman and finance ministry officials had quizzed Parekh on difficulties faced by taxpayers after the launch of new income tax e-filing portal. The minister had asked Infosys to address all issues without further loss of time, improve their services, redress grievances on priority as it was impacting taxpayers adversely. During the meeting, Parekh had taken note of the issues highlighted by the stakeholders and assured resolution of the problems in a few days.
Speaking to a group of journalists a week ago, the minister had said I-T portal glitches would be rectified “in 2-3 days”.
But the new portal http://www.incometax.gov.in continues to be affected by several technical glitches/issues, leading to taxpayer inconvenience. As a result, the income tax department has to relax various norms, including allowing submission of income tax compliance forms 15CA/15B in manual format to the authorised dealers for any remittances to non-residents.
The much-touted new user friendly e-filing portal was aimed at easing service delivery from immediate processing of income tax returns (ITRs) to issue quick refunds to taxpayers.