I-T portal glitches: FM asks Nilekani, Infosys not to let down taxpayers

IT firm regrets initial glitches, promises to fix them

Infosys came under fire from Finance Minister (FM) Nirmala Sitharaman as income-tax (I-T) filers faced technical hiccups on the new tax e-filing portal, which went live on June 7 night. Many users posted tweets tagging the FM.

Sitharaman asked Infosys and its co-founder and chairman Nandan Nilekani to address the grievances in a tweet and “not let taxpayers down”.

Nilekani assured the FM that the company was working to resolve the issue, hours after she raised concerns on tech glitches and grievances on the newly launched e-filing portal.

In a tweet on late Tuesday evening, Nilekani said, “The new e-filing portal will ease the filing process and enhance end-user experience. @nsitharaman 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.”

The new e-filing portal 2.0 was unveiled on Monday, replacing the earlier version, with new additional features aimed at significantly reducing the time required to process income-tax returns (ITRs) and issuing refunds. 

On Tuesday morning, Sitharaman tweeted, “The much-awaited e-filing portal 2.0 was launched last night at 20:45 hours. I see in my timeline grievances and glitches. Hope @Infosys and @NandanNilekani will not let our taxpayers down in the quality of service being provided. Ease in compliance for the taxpayer should be our priority.”

The minister’s tweet followed her announcement on the new portal - www.incometax.gov.in - stating it was an "important milestone to make the compliance experience more taxpayer-friendly".

Soon after, her timeline was flooded with complaints. Some taxpayers complained about the non-availability of the tax deducted at source form. Others had issues with navigation or were getting logged out.

Former Infosys executive Mohandas Pai defended the company in a tweet saying: “Every large system like this will have issues. Most are at the user side too. User education, data input, data population, comments on design, etc take time to settle.”

Some industry sources also said it could be due to the global outage of internet services by Cloud company Fastly.

Infosys was awarded the contract in 2019 after a bidding process, with an outlay of Rs 4,241.97 crore. With this project, the I-T filing system was supposed to be managed completely by Infosys. The project was to be completed in 18 months and was to be launched after three months of testing.

This is not the first time one of the government portals developed by Infosys has faced glitches. In fact, both the goods and services tax network (GSTN) and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs site are maintained by the company, and have been facing issues.

However, sources in the tax department said the GSTN portal was different from the I-T portal, given the former was a new system wherein each area was introduced for the first time, such as devising returns, tax credits, matching of input credits, etc.

“This new I-T portal is more of an integration and upgrade of the existing system which has been in place. This was being developed for essentially integrating e-filing and centralised processing centre (CPC) 2.0 project of the I-T department,” said a tax official. 

According to him, CPC was a back-end service unlike e-filing, which is a front-end one and has greater user load. 

CPC went live in December last year. The new portal was scheduled to go live on June 7. It took seven days to migrate all data and services to a single portal.  

He added that Infosys has been working with the government on different projects and teething issues will be resolved at the earliest.

Tax sources say the portal is also looking at expanding the payment gateway of the existing authorised bank. This will allow taxpayers to file ITR with their debit and credit cards as well. It will also soon have a centralised dashboard for viewing uploads and interactions. A new call centre with chatbots and videos will help taxpayers. 

In 2020, the finance ministry had flagged 17 'areas of dissatisfaction' with Infosys-managed GSTN, including transition issues for taxpayers in Jammu & Kashmir, Aadhaar verification, and lack of scalability of server. The other areas the ministry had flagged as unresolved included delay in providing software for blocking of e-way bill generation in the case of non-filers.