Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, on Tuesday, asked Infosys to address all issues related to the new Income Tax e-filing portal without further loss of time.

Meanwhile, Infosys— the developer of the website, www.incometax.gov.in— has said few of the issues have been resolved and few will be taken care in a week’s time.

Meeting with Infosys chief

Sitharaman chaired a meeting with the Infosys team comprising the firm’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Salil Parekh, and Chief Operating Officer, Praveen Rao, besides others.

According to a statement issued by the Finance Ministry, the Minister exhorted Infosys to work on the tax portal to make it more humane and user-friendly. She expressed her deep concern on the various problems faced by stakeholders in the new portal, which was expected to provide a seamless experience to taxpayers.

“She asked Infosys to address all issues without further loss of time, improve their services, redress grievances on priority as it was impacting taxpayers adversely,” said the statement.

The Finance Minister also hoped that positive engagement between taxpayers, tax professionals and the government would continue in the future and assured them that the government is responsive to their problems and is proactively committed to enhance taxpayer service and experience.

Since its launch, there have been numerous glitches in the functioning of the new portal. Taking note of the grievances voiced on social media by taxpayers, tax professionals and other stakeholders, the Minister flagged the issues to Infosys, calling upon them to address these concerns.

The Ministry also invited suggestions and it received 700 e-mails detailing over 2,000 issues, including 90 unique issues/problems in the portal.

Technical issues

During the meeting, the Infosys team acknowledged the technical issues in the functioning of the portal and shared the status of the resolution with respect to the issues highlighted by stakeholders. They informed that Infosys has been working to fix the technical issues noticed in the functioning of the portal and that they have augmented the resources for execution of the project on the hardware as well as the application side. The team also informed and that some of the issues have already been identified and fixed.

“For theother remaining technical issues, they assured that their teams were working on these issues and gave the expected timelines within which the issues such as e-proceedings, form 15CA/15CB, TDS statements, DSC, viewing of past ITRs etc. are expected to be resolved in about a week. It was also decided that the timelines mentioned by Infosys to redress the issues would also be placed in public domain in due course,” the statement said.

In the meantime, according to a statement issued by the Institute of Chartered Accounts (ICAI), the Ministry asked the professional body to constitute a task force of seven representatives to look into the technical glitches/issues being faced on the new Income Tax portal. “We believe this process will be almost complete in a phased manner and problems will be resolved on daily basis. For tax audit report, which is awaited by CAs, utility shall be available by the first week of July 2021,” said ICAI.

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