The Union government’s new Income Tax e-filing portal was launched on the evening of June 7, and has been touted to have a host of new features for taxpayers. However, soon after it was launched, the site is not opening for many, and users are also experiencing technical glitches. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman even took to Twitter to say that she sees grievances about the website and glitches on her timeline, and that ease in compliance should be priority. She tagged Infosys and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, stating that she hopes they will not let down taxpayers in quality of service.
“The much awaited e-filing portal 2.0 was launched last night 20:45hrs. I see in my TL grievances and glitches. Hope @Infosys & @NandanNilekani will not let down our taxpayers in the quality of service being provided. Ease in compliance for the taxpayer should be our priority,” she tweeted.
The new portal’s URL http://incometax.gov.in replaced the long-existing http://incometaxindiaefiling.
Within 24 Hr of New Income Tax Portal, after it's launch at 8.45 PM Yesterday & Imm. Scheduled Maintenance on 8th Jun from 12.30 AM to 04 AM site is not working at 12.00 PM already. Kudoos !! @IncomeTaxIndia @Infosys @nsitharaman @FinMinIndia @nsitharamanoffc #incometaxportal pic.twitter.com/BP10ASuRO3
— M M Saboo and Co. (@CoSaboo) June 8, 2021
@nsitharamanoffc Most Respectfully, Income Tax E-filing site (V 2.0) is not operational and perhaps not accessible to users at large...The issue may suitably be taken care of and efforts must be directed to rectify the errors apparent therein....
— Sameer Bhatia (@Reemasbhatiya) June 8, 2021
@nsitharaman @IncomeTaxIndia @Infosys_GSTN @PMOIndia @narendramodi @icai THIS IS how new Income tax site workings
— CHANDAN GOYAL (@CHANDAN67397056) June 8, 2021
shall we professional start to ask for extensions right now
on what criteria work alloted to infosys when they were big failure to handle GST site pic.twitter.com/YVQcUrIBXF
@IncomeTaxIndia @nsitharaman Can not login to New Income Tax Site. Issue with site or issue at my end? pic.twitter.com/EcC8vNONW5
— Nimesh Dedhia (@nmdedhia) June 8, 2021
In January 2019, the Union government announced that Infosys had been selected to implement the project after a competitive bidding process, and had an initial timeline of 18 months with three months for testing.
This is not the first time there has been trouble with Infosys and government portals. Infosys was also tasked with building the GST Network portal, which too had repeatedly seen glitches. In March last year, the Finance Ministry had pulled up Infosys over the glitches. The ministry had said that despite the portal being operational for over 30 months, taxpayers were still facing trouble. At the time, the Ministry also reportedly flagged 17 areas of dissatisfaction.
The new portal, as per the Central Board of Direct Taxes, is integrated with immediate processing of Income Tax Returns (ITRs) to issue quick refunds to taxpayers, and all interactions and uploads or pending actions will be displayed on a single dashboard for follow-up action by the taxpayer. It will also have a free ITR preparation software with interactive questions to help taxpayers file ITRs 1, 4 (online and offline) and ITR 2 (offline) to begin with, and the facility for preparation of ITRs 3, 5, 6 and 7 will be made available shortly, the department had said in a statement.
Taxpayers should also be able to update their profile to provide certain details of their income, including salary, house property and business/profession, which will be used in pre-filling their ITR in the new web portal. Detailed enablement of pre-filling with salary income, interest, dividend and capital gains will be available after TDS (tax deducted at source) and SFT (statement of financial transaction) statements are uploaded (due date June 30, 2021), it added.