Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has asked information technology services provider Infosys to fix persistent technical issues in the new income tax returns filing portal by September 15, ahead of the tax returns deadline.
She also directed the company to ramp up resources to ensure timely tax filing services to millions of taxpayers.
The minister summoned Infosys Managing Director and CEO Salil Parekh on Monday to seek an explanation over the IT bellwether’s inability to resolve the snags in the portal even after two-and-a-half months since its launch on June 7.
Within hours of its launch, complaints flooded with users facing issues such as inability to generate OTP for Aadhaar number validation, generate password, link old data for past returns, etc. Due to these glitches, most taxpayers could not file their returns in time and deadlines had to be extended.
When the portal became inaccessible during the weekends due to maintenance activity, the minister summoned Parekh, according to reports on Tuesday.
The Centre asked Infosys to rework or make some modifications in the back-end of the portal, which created issues in data migration and integration. The ministry asked Infosys to put in additional resources and efforts for timely delivery of agreed services, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) said.
Infosys was also sensitized on the difficulties the taxpayers faced and the problems due to delays in the portal’s functioning.
The government had recently extended the due date for filing tax returns for the assessment year 2021-22 to September 30. However, if the glitches persist, it may consider a further extension.
During the meeting, Parekh explained that Infosys was doing everything it could to ensure the smooth functioning of the portal. More than 750 team members were working on this project and Chief Operating Officer Pravin Rao was overseeing it.
In 2019, the government had awarded Infosys the contract to develop the new portal to reduce processing time for filing returns from 63 days to one day and expedite refunds at the earliest.