The Finance Ministry has flagged 17 ‘areas of dissatisfaction’ with Infosys-designed GST Network, including transition issues for taxpayers in Jammu and Kashmir, Aadhaar verification and lack of scalability of server.

The other areas which the Ministry has flagged as “unresolved or late resolved” with Infosys include delay in providing software for blocking of e-way bill generation for non-filers of GSTR-3B.

Besides, new supply code for point-of-sale outside India or deploying a feature that would allow assigning registration application to the same jurisdictional officer after rejection (a decision on which had been taken in early 2019), were also flagged by the Ministry.

Infosys, which in 2015 won the contract for managing back-end for GST Network (GSTN), has drawn flak from the Ministry over the tech glitches, some of which are not been resolved for almost two years.

The Ministry has sought an urgent resolution plan from the Bengaluru-based software giant to address these tech glitches and the 17 areas have been highlighted by the government, sources said. An email sent to Infosys on the issue did not elicit any comment.

Onus lies with the company

Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani has been summoned by the Government to make a presentation before the GST Council on March 14, following high-level meetings at the Ministry to fix the problems. The Ministry has made it clear to Infosys that the onus of performance of GST portal lies with the company and that it should meet the expectations.

In a letter to Infosys on March 5, the Ministry had said some of the problems highlighted as early as 2018 are still unresolved and failures month after month have lead to genuine taxpayers “getting frustrated“.

Infosys is requested to go through the pending issues, day-to-day disruptions and the future road map and come up with a plan for quick resolution within 15 days.

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