Government gives Infosys September 15 deadline to sort I-T portal glitches, conveys disappointment

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has given Infosys a September 15 deadline to resolve glitches on the Income Tax Department's new e-filing portal. Taxpayers have been facing these issues for a long and have raised them on Twitter with the Finance Minister and Infosys.

After the portal was unavailable for two consecutive days, meetings were held on Monday with Infosys MD & CEO Salil Parekh and other Infosys representatives in North Block. The first meeting was held with the Finance Minister and the second meeting was with officials from the Income Tax Department.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman sought an explanation from Infosys on the 'repeated issues' faced by taxpayers and conveyed deep disappointment and concerns of the government and the taxpayers about the continuing glitches in the portal since its launch.

Meanwhile, a statement was issued by the Income Tax Department saying Parekh had assured he and his team were doing everything possible to ensure the smooth functioning of the portal.

"Over 750 team members are working on this project and Pravin Rao, COO of Infosys, is personally overseeing this project. He also assured that Infosys is working expeditiously to ensure a glitch-free experience to the taxpayers on the portal," the statement said.

The new e-filing portal, executed by the Bengaluru-based software major, was launched on June 7 and started to face issues within hours of its launch. Initially, there were problems like inability to generate OTP for Aadhaar validation, password generation glitches, failure to link old data for past returns, and problems in filing returns.

Now taxpayers are facing bigger glitches ranging from interest calculation, capturing of details from Form 16, and the inability to add details for tax exemption for trusts.