What's Wrong With The Income Tax E-Filing Portal? How Can Infosys Help?

We explain what glitches have been reported in the tax portal and what is being done to address them.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman (left), Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani (right).

(Image: Altered by The Quint)

After the tax department’s newly launched income tax e-filing portal reported glitches, Finance Ministry officials summoned Infosys MD and CEO Salil Parekh on Monday, 23 August.

This is the second time in two months that Infosys had to explain the reasons for the ongoing glitches on the income tax e-filing portal.

Meanwhile, the portal is still not functioning and is suffering from several serious problems causing great and unavoidable hardships to the taxpayers and their representatives.

The Ministry of Finance has now given Infosys a deadline of 15 September to resolve all the glitches. We explain what glitches can be seen in the tax portal and what is being done by the government to resolve it.

What Happened?

On 7 June, the Income Tax department announced its launch of a new e-filing portal http://www.incometax.gov.in.

This portal is developed and run by Infosys. The new e-filing portal was expected to replace the old e-filing portal; it was viewed to create a strong technology backbone by enabling a host of new functionalities to the taxpayers including enhancement of features, feel and user experience. The new portal was mainly presented with a motto of 'Reset, Realign and Restart!'.

However, just within few hours of its launch, the portal started reporting glitches such as inability to generate an OTP for Aadhaar validation, password generation failure, errors while linking old data for past returns, and problems in filing returns.

What Are The Issues Faced by Tax Filers?

Here are some of the major issues that tax filers continue to face:

• Unable to login

• Errors while calculating interest

• Incorrect capturing of details from Form 16

• ITR-1 not being accepted even days after submission

• Inability to e-verify the ITR after filing

• Form 26AS details not getting automatically populated

• Unsecure connection to the website

• Slow website

Chartered accountants and taxpayers have asked for further extension of filing deadlines citing the persisting issues on the website.

"The most fundamental and basic defect observed by many users which ideally should have been tested before the launch is that the new portal did not even allow the users to login and enter their accounts on the portal."

Bombay chartered Accountants Society

The due date for filing ITR was earlier extended to 30 September from 31 July, for tax audit cases to 30 November and for transfer pricing cases to 31 December.

What is The Government Doing?

Sitharaman on 22 June hosted a meeting with officials of Infosys, including Parekh and Pravin Rao and asked them to fix the glitches without any further delay.

During the meeting, Infosys said it has been working to fix the technical issues.

At least five issues — e-proceedings, Form 15CA/15CB, TDS statements, DSC, viewing of past ITRs — were expected to be resolved in about a week, an official statement had said.

“I have been reminding Infosys constantly, and Nandan Nilekani has been messaging me with assurances that in the next couple of days they will sort out the majority of problems," said Sitharaman.

But, as complaints continued, the IT department took cognizance of the situation on Sunday, and summoned Salil Parekh on Monday to explain to Sitharaman why even after 2.5 months since the launch of the new e-filing portal, the glitches remain unresolved. In fact, since 21 August the portal was not available for use.

What is Infosys saying?

On 19 June, at the 40th annual general meeting of Infosys, COO Pravin Rao had said, “We are deeply concerned with the initial inconvenience that the new e-filing portal has caused the users and are committed to resolving all the issues at the earliest."

Infosys India Business unit on Sunday tweeted: “The emergency maintenance of the @IncomeTaxIndia portal has concluded and the portal is live. We regret any inconvenience caused to taxpayers.”

“The @IncomeTaxIndia portal continues to be under emergency maintenance. We will post an update once the portal is available again for taxpayers. We regret the inconvenience," tweeted Infosys India Business unit.