Infosys' deadline to fix I-T portal runs out today, users say glitches remain

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The government’s September 15 deadline for the Bengaluru-based IT major Infosys to fix the income-tax (I-T) portal may have run out but the glitches are far from resolved, tax professionals and users have said.

According to them, while some features have improved, there is still a long way to go. The government’s decision to extend the deadline for filing income-tax returns (ITRs) to December 31, 2021 had alleviated immediate concerns, they said.

“Compared to what it was last month, the portal is definitely better,” S Sundararajan, a chartered accountant in Tamil Nadu’s Kanyakumari, said. “What the company has done is smart. The tools and functionalities that are needed for the basic filing of your ITR have been done and are more or less seamless.”

An email has been sent to Infosys seeking comments on the glitches and if the company will get time till December to resolve all the issues. The story will be updated when we get a response from the company.

The portal

Infosys was in 2019 awarded a Rs 4,200-crore contract to develop the new e-filing portal to replace the old one to reduce the processing time from 63 days to one.

The idea was to have a taxpayer-friendly portal that was simple to use and expedited refunds but the portal has been more in news for being inaccessible than making the process smooth. The portal was launched on June 7, 2021 amid peak tax season and things started going downhill from the word go.

Glitches

Persistent glitches forced Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to call Infosys’ executives for meeting twice, in June and on August 23. Sitharaman gave the IT major time till September 15 to get the portal in order.

“A number of technical issues have been addressed and there is a positive trend reflected in the statistics of the various filings on the portal,” the Ministry of Finance said in a statement recently.

It said close to 1.19 crore ITRs were filed, of which 76.2 lakh taxpayers used the online portal.

Tax professionals conceded that some of the issues had been sorted out. Vinay CS, a Bengaluru-based chartered accountant, said that some features had improved.

For one, basic functions such as filing an individual’s returns had been resolved and so has the access to older documents, which was a challenge.

A long way to go

While there seem to have been improvements, a lot needs to be done. For many, receiving one-time passwords (OTP) is still a task and not all tools are functioning.

Vinay said many professionals who file in bulk for their clients were doing it through third-party software. “As of now, the new portal is not taking external software-based filings without glitches. So those professionals are still waiting,” he said.

A tax professional, who didn’t wish to be identified, has close to 40 people in the queue whose data has been saved in the external software but he has not been able to process the refund as integration remains a challenge.

Multiple users on Twitter, too, have raised concerns. In a statement on September 6, the Tax Advocates Association of Bengal said that problems with the portal were not the same for all the taxpayers.

“The total tax paid in the online portal is showing less than what I have paid as per Form 26AS. There is no response from the IT team despite calling them 3 times,” Ashish, a Twitter user, said.

Another user Vineet said OTP remained an issue even after clicking on the “resend button”. The lack of a grievance redressal mechanism has not helped.

It is unclear if the portal will be glitch-free from September 15 but the extension of the ITR filling date comes as a relief.

“Most of us have gotten out of the system and we are focusing on other things such as Goods and Services Tax,” said Sundararajan.

Another tax professional said the year-end deadline for filing returns had reduced anxiety among professionals.

“As Indians, our mentality is to file everything at the last minute. So the extension, though not necessary, is as good as giving the company time till December to fix the issues,” said an independent tax consultant, who did not want to be named.