Finance Ministry summoned Infosys MD and CEO Salil Parekh on Aug 23 after the new income tax portal faced technical glitches and remained unavailable for two continuous days.
The Chief Executive is called to explain the reasons for the failure to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman after two months of the portal’s launch.
The portal went live on June 7 and has not been available since August 21, till the late evening of August 22.
The tech giant tweeted on Sunday, explaining the maintenance activities that led to the website’s unavailability. Post the emergency maintenance, the portal went up again around 9 PM tonight.
“The emergency maintenance of the @IncomeTaxIndia portal has concluded and the portal is live. We regret any inconvenience caused to taxpayers,” Infosys India Business unit tweeted.
The meeting will also be attended by members from ICAI, auditors, consultants and it is said that the taxpayers will also attend the meeting.
“The new portal has been fraught with several technical glitches/issues leading to taxpayer inconvenience. Written representations of the problems/difficulties faced in the portal have also been invited from the stakeholders.
Representatives from Infosys team will be present to answer queries, clarify issues and receive inputs on the working of the portal, to remove glitches and sort out issues faced by the taxpayers,” the tax department said.
The contract was given to Infosys in 2019 to make a new income tax filing system, aimed at shortening the processing time for ITR to one day from 63 days.
The glitches faced by the portal were password generation, failure to generate OTP for Aadhaar validation, inability to link old data for past returns, and filing returns.
“Ministry of Finance has summoned Sh Salil Parekh, MD & CEO @Infosys on 23/08/2021 to explain to hon’ble FM as to why even after 2.5 months since the launch of new e-filing portal, glitches in the portal have not been resolved. In fact, since 21/08/2021 the portal itself is not available,” the Income Tax department tweeted.
Finance Minister Sitharaman assured the taxpayers last week that the issues faced in the new portal would probably be fixed over the next few days.
“I have been reminding Infosys constantly, and (Infosys head) Nandan Nilekani has been messaging me with assurances that next couple of days they will sort out the majority of problems,” she had said.
As the issues pertaining to performance are resolved, as many as 10 lakh income tax returns have been filed since the launch, according to the giant’s COO, UB Pravin Rao.
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