The Ministry of Finance has summoned Infosys on August 23 as the new IT portal continues to see glitches even 2.5 months after the launch. The portal was not accessible from August 21.
In a tweet, the IT department said, “Ministry of Finance has summoned Salil Parekh, MD&CEO @Infosys on 23/08/2021 to explain to hon'ble FM as to why even after 2.5 months since 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.”
This is the second time the company will be meeting the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman over the glitches in the IT portal.
Acknowledging that the portal was not accessible, Infosys said in a Twitter statement on August 21, “The Income Tax India portal is currently inaccessible due to planned maintenance. We will post an update as soon as the portal is live again for taxpayers. We regret the inconvenience caused.”
“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,” it further added on August 22.
The new income tax portal went live on June 7 and ran into glitches the next day. It was flagged by the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who met the Infosys executives on June 22.
Infosys was awarded the contract in 2019 after the bidding process with an outlay of Rs 4,242 crore. The project aimed at developing the next-generation income tax filing system to reduce processing time for returns from 63 days to one day and also expedite refunds.
During the meeting with the FM, Infosys executives had shared that the firm has augmented the resources for execution of the project on the hardware as well as the application side and that some of the problems have already been identified and fixed.
Infosys is working to address all the issues related to the new income tax portal. Many performance related issues have been resolved and close to 10 lakh income tax returns have been filed so far, said company's COO UB Pravin Rao on July 14.
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