The new portal by the Income Tax department crashed on the first day of operations within 24 hours of its launch. Facing grievances from the taxpayers, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman publicly called out the IT service provider Infosys and its co-founder Nandan Nilekani and asked them to rectify the same.
As a response to this, Nilkani acknowledged some glitches, expressed the company's regret for the same and assured future stability.
The new portal (incometax.gov.in) went live on June 7 at 8:45 pm, but several users reported that it was unreachable, posting pictures and screenshots of blank white screens and error messages on their social media timelines.
The hashtag '#incometaxportal' is trending on Twitter.
This is not the first time the IT major has been at the receiving end of the Finance Ministry's dissatisfaction. Infosys had also developed and currently manages the IT infrastructure behind the Goods and Services Tax (GST) network.
The impending launch of the new portal kept the income tax filing network down from June 1 through June 6 and was the Income Tax Department's way of providing an uncomplicated way for even those users with little tax knowledge to file their returns.
According to the government, the new IT portal will have the following features:
- The ability to process income tax returns immediately
- A singular dashboard for all interactions and pending actions
- A new free-of-cost filing software to for users to file their returns through an interactive list of questions for a cross section of ITR numbers.
- Users can submit a profile of their salary, business, property which will be used to pre-file their ITR. After a tax-deducted-at-source statement is uploaded, the portal also pre-fills forms.
There would be new user manuals, FAQs, chatbots, live agents and a call centre.
The new tax payment system, however, would be launched on June 18.