Finance Ministry held meeting with Infosys on issues in the new Income Tax Portal

Finance Ministry held meeting with Infosys on issues in the new Income Tax Portal

A meeting was held between the senior officials of the Finance Ministry and Infosys, service provider on 22nd of June 2021 to discuss the numerous glitches in the functioning of the new Income Tax portal which went live on 7th of June 2021.
 
Members Present:
Hon’ble Finance Minister, Smt. N. Sitharaman. MoS(Finance), Shri Anurag Singh Thakur presided over the meeting. Shri Tarun Bajaj, Secretary Revenue, Shri J. B. Mohapatra, Chairman, CBDT, Smt. Anu J. Singh, Member(L & Systems), CBDT, and other senior officers of CBDT participated in the meeting. Infosys was represented by its MD & CEO, Shri Salil Parekh and COO, Shri Praveen Rao, and other members of their team. The meeting was also attended by 10 tax professionals from across the country, including representatives of ICAI and All India Federation of Tax Practitioners (AIFTP).
This interaction was followed by another detailed meeting between senior officers of the Department of Revenue and the Infosys team, covering technical issues in the new portal.
 
Issues Addressed:
Many grievances were voiced by taxpayers on the social media platform. Consequently, a meeting was decided to be held between Finance Ministry and Infosys as also other stakeholders on 22.06.2021. Simultaneously, suggestions in respect of the glitches on the portal were invited online by 18.06.2021. It is mentioned in the press release that more than 700 emails detailing over 2000 issues including 90 unique issues/problems in the portal were received in response and the Hon'ble Finance Minister expressed her gratitude for the same ensuring that the suggestions would be taken up in all earnestness and would be addressed on priority.
 
In the press release, it is specified that the Hon’ble Minister has exhorted Infosys to work on the tax portal to make it more humane and user-friendly. She has expressed her deep concern on the various problems being faced by the stakeholders in the new portal which was expected to provide a seamless experience to taxpayers and she has asked Infosys to address all issues without further loss of time, improve their services, redress grievances on priority as it was impacting taxpayers adversely.
 
Role of taxpayers:
During the meeting, the Hon’ble Finance Minister emphasized that enhanced taxpayer service is an important priority for the present Government and every effort should be made to amplify the same. The Hon’ble Finance Minister concluded her remarks by appreciating the taxpayers who have kept up with the timelines of compliances despite the Covid-19 pandemic. She also hoped that the positive engagement between taxpayers, tax professionals and the Government would continue in the future. She assured them that the Government is responsive to their problems and is proactively committed to enhancing taxpayer service and experience.
 
Infosys' Response:
The team from Infosys, which was led by the CEO and COO of Infosys, took note of the issues highlighted by the stakeholders. They also noted the observations and suggestions received from various users and stakeholders through email. The Infosys team acknowledged the technical issues in the functioning of the portal and shared the status of the resolution w.r.t the issues highlighted by the stakeholders. They informed that Infosys has been working to fix the technical issues noticed in the functioning of the portal and that they have augmented the resources for execution of the project on the hardware as well as the application side and that some of the issues have already been identified and fixed. For the other remaining technical issues, they assured that their teams were working on these issues and gave the expected timelines within which the issues such as e-proceedings, Form 15CA/15CB, TDS statements, DSC, viewing of past ITRs etc. are expected to be resolved in about a week. It was also decided that the timelines mentioned by Infosys to redress the issues would also be placed in public domain in due course.