Government asks Infosys Chairman for clarification regarding failure to fix technical glitches in GSTN

The Finance Ministry has asked clarification from Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani regarding software giant’s failure to fix technical glitches in the Goods & Services Tax Network (GSTN) portal, The Times of India reported on Monday.

Nilekani has been asked to provide a detailed presentation before the GST Council next week which is scheduled to meet on March 14, the report said.

With complaints rising against the IT system of Goods & Service Tax (GST), the Finance Ministry had summoned Infosys back in January asking the tech giant to provide an explanation for its slow response in fixing the bugs as per previous reports.

CN Raghupati, Senior Vice-President of Infosys and V Ranganathan, Vice-President had been summoned by the Finance Ministry in January after repeated complaints from businesses and industry over the technical glitches on the GSTN portal while filing returns.

The problems included slowing down of GSTN portal, login errors, auto-logouts, non-delivery of OTP or delayed OTP, network error or Gateway timeout, OTP issues on email or on a few domains, open file error, GSTR-9C document not uploading, etc as per the report.

The government had introduced voluntary uploading of e-invoices on the GSTN portal from January 1 for businesses having a turnover of over ₹500 crore. It was made effective from February 1 for businesses with an annual turnover of over ₹100 crore. The government is set to mandate the e-voicing from April 1 for companies having an aggregate revenue of ₹100 crore or more. The government is considering deferring the implementation of GST e-invoicing to July 1 instead of April, according to an Economic Times report.

Only 1 per cent of the taxpayers have used the portal which has garnered mixed to negative responses from companies. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had pulled up the tech major for their slow response in fixing technical glitches faced by the taxpayers at a meeting last week according to the report.

Infosys is the technology service provider for GSTN.