Senior officials of the Union finance ministry will hold a meeting with information technology company Infosys on June 22 to address the technical problems on the Income Tax department’s new e-filing website. Infosys has developed the newly-launched income tax filing portal, which is expected to reduce the processing time for tax returns.
In a statement, the ministry said that members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, auditors, consultants and taxpayers will also be a part of the meeting. “The new portal has been fraught with several technical glitches/issues leading to taxpayer inconvenience,” the statement said. “Written representations on the problems/difficulties faced in the portal have also been invited from the stakeholders.”
It added that the representatives from the Infosys team will answer questions, clarify problems and receive inputs on the functioning of the portal in order to remove the glitches and solve the complications faced by the taxpayers.
The portal was launched on June 7 with a host of new features for taxpayers. However, social media users said that the website was not working and complained that certain features were taking longer than usual to load in the new portal.
A day later, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman flagged the glitches on Twitter, asking Infosys and its chairperson Nandan Nilekani to fix the problems. She had tagged the company and Nilekani in her post.
Hours later, Nilekani said that his company “regrets the glitches” and was working to resolve them. Responding to Sitharaman’s post, Nilekani said that he expects the system to stabilise during the week.
The new URL of the tax filing website, https://www.incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in/home, replaced the long-existing http://incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in.
In 2019, Infosys was given a contract to develop the new website to reduce processing time for tax returns from 63 days to one day and expedite refunds.
The Bengaluru-headquartered company had also developed the government’s Goods and Services Tax Network portal. In 2020, the government took exception of the firm’s “tardy” progress in resolving glitches.
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