With the new Income Tax filing portal becoming completely inaccessible over the weekend, and yet to become fully functional 77 days after its launch, a furious Finance Ministry summoned Infosys Managing Director and CEO Salil Parekh to explain the mess to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in person on August 23.
“Ministry of Finance has summoned Shri 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 stated on August 22.
Also read: All you need to know about filing Income Tax Returns
And just hours after the ‘summons’, the Income Tax portal became accessible again on August 22 evening. “The emergency maintenance of the @IncomeTaxIndia portal has concluded and the portal is live. We regret any inconvenience caused to taxpayers,” Infosys said in a tweet at 8.52 p.m. IST.
The Ministry had launched the ‘taxpayer friendly’ portal developed by Infosys on June 7, promising immediate processing of I-T returns to issue quick refunds to taxpayers, and a host of other features. But many critical functionalities were non-starters from Day One and problems continued to fester despite a claimed course correction.
On August 21 afternoon, Infosys said the I-T portal is ‘currently inaccessible due to planned maintenance’. On August 22, the company switched from the ‘planned maintenance’ argument to say that the portal ‘continues to be under emergency maintenance’.
The Finance Ministry went public with the summons to Mr. Parekh about 100 minutes later.
“We will post an update once the portal is available again for taxpayers. We regret the inconvenience,” the global IT major’s India business unit said on Twitter.
Infosys didn’t respond to calls from The Hindu. However, the firm’s CEO is expected to comply with the Ministry’s ‘summons’ on August 23.
The non-functioning of the portal is particularly embarrassing for the government as just last week, the Finance Minister had said all its glitches werevexpected to be fixed entirely in the ‘next two-three days’.
Revenue Secretary Tarun Bajaj had been “neutrally monitoring the progress” on fixing the glitches ‘on a weekly basis’ and 10-15 taxation experts were working with the Ministry to engage with Infosys on a day-to-day basis, she had said.
“I have been reminding Infosys constantly not to let the taxpayers down… and Nandan Nilekani has been messaging me — ‘this is where we are… I assure you we will sort it out’. I have been reminding them ‘August is coming’, ‘August is here’, and so on,” the Minister said on August 16.
On June 8, after Ms. Sitharaman had red-flagged problems with the portal on Twitter, Infosys co-founder and chairman Nandan Nilekani had said: “The new e-filing portal will ease the filing process and enhance end user experience. @nsitharaman ji, we have observed some technical issues on day one, and are working to resolve them. @Infosys regrets these initial glitches and expects the system to stabilise during the week.”
A fortnight later, the Ministry held a joint interaction with Infosys, with chartered accountants, auditors and tax payers to try and understand the extent of problems plaguing the portal and sort out taxpayers’ challenges.
Ms. Sitharaman expressed regret about the new portal’s dysfunctional systems on July 28 and said the portal had been tried out before its launch.
“Infosys is quite closely working with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and the Ministry, and rapidly, there is, at least from what I hear from CAs and income tax professionals, there’s definitely a lot of improvement. I wish it didn’t have to happen this way, but we are correcting course, and sooner the portal will be, as is planned, easy to use,” she had said.
