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Nirmala Sitharaman meets Infosys officials, reviews tech glitches on I-T e-filing portal
Infosys is the vendor which developed the new I-T e-filing portal.
Union finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday told officials concerned to address all issues regarding the technical glitches that the new income tax e-filing portal faced "without further loss of time, improve their services, redress grievances on priority as it was impacting taxpayers adversely".
Sitharaman was speaking after holding a review meet with Infosys officials over the glitch. Minister of state for finance Anurag Thakur, revenue secretary Tarun Bajaj, CBDT chairperson Jagannath Mohapatra and other senior ministry officials were also present at the meeting.
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Infosys, the vendor which developed the new site, was represented by its chairperson Salil Parekh and chief operating officer Shri Praveen Rao along with a few other members from the company.
The meeting was also attended by 10 tax professionals from across the country, including representatives of Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) and All India Federation of Tax Practitioners (AIFTP).
The portal was launched on June 7 following which users faced technical issues on it including the long time it took while logging in, its inability to generate OTP for Aadhaar validation and non-availability of Income Tax Returns for past years on the portal.
Several users complained of the issues in writing, highlighting the portal's weak user interface.
"Since its launch, there were numerous glitches in the functioning of the new portal. Taking note of the grievances voiced on social media by taxpayers, tax professionals and other stakeholders, the Finance Minister had also flagged the issues to the vendor M/s Infosys, calling upon them to address these concerns," a release issued by the finance ministry said.
"However, since the portal continued to be plagued by technical glitches causing inconvenience to taxpayers, it was decided to hold a meeting between Finance Ministry and Infosys as also other stakeholders here today. Suggestions in respect of the glitches on the portal were invited online by 18.06.2021. More than 700 emails detailing over 2,000 issues including 90 unique issues/problems in the portal were received in response to the same," the release added.
The Infosys officials informed the ministers that their team had acknowledged the technical issues and it was working to fix them.
"...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," the release read.
