Infosys CEO summoned by the finance minister after weeks-long unresolved glitches in the tax portal.
Infosys’ new income tax portal was supposed to be fully operational from June 7. But it was not fully accessible over the two months after its launch, which angered many.
The outraged Finance Department summoned the CEO and CEO of Infosys Salil Parekh to explain personally to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in person on August 23.
About the new income tax portal
In 2019, Infosys was awarded a contract to develop a next-generation tax payment system to reduce processing time from 63 days to one day and speed up refunds.
As of June 2021, the government had paid ₹ 164.5 crores to Infosys for the portal.
Why was Infosys CEO summoned?
A new tax-based software platform designed and implemented by the Bengaluru based software company was launched on June 7 .
And within hours, began to deal with problems such as failing to generate OTP for Aadhaar authentication, password generating glitches, failure to past link data for previous returns, and file problems.
A day after its launch, Finance Minister Twitter tweeted Infosys and its founder Nandan Nilekani asking for a resolution of complaints and glitches and reassuring them that,
“Hope Infosys and Nandan Nilekani will not disappoint our taxpayers.” Mr Nilekani had replied on June 9 that Infosys expected the site to be stable “during the week” and was working to resolve the issue.
Two weeks later, the Department partnered with Infosys, hired accountants, auditors, and taxpayers to understand the magnitude of the site’s problems and address taxpayer challenges.
Ms Sitharaman expressed regret over the malfunctioning plans for the new portal on July 28 and said they had tried the site launching it.
“Infosys works closely with the Indian Institute of Chartered Accountants and the Department, and soon, there is, at least from what I hear from CAs and tax professionals, there is a lot of progress. I wish it had not happened this way, but we are fixing the course, and soon the site will be, as planned, easier to use,” he said.
On Saturday, the company said the site was “currently not accessible due to planned repairs”. Yesterday cited “emergency repairs”.
In response, the finance ministry publicly summoned Mr Parekh to answer their questions. A few hours after the ‘summons’, the Income Tax website was re-accessed on the evening of August 22.
“The urgent renovation of the @IncomeTaxIndia website has been completed, and the site is live. We regret any inconvenience to taxpayers,” Infosys tweeted at 9 pm.
The manager of Infosys must explain to the Minister of Finance “why even after 2.5 months since the launch of the new e-filing site, issues in this portal have never been resolved”, the tweet said.
He pointed out that the site had not been available since Saturday.
This income tax portal is the second such government program – Infosys that has gotten into trouble.
Infosys has also set up a GST Network (GSTN) website to facilitate payment of GST (Goods and Services Tax). Great software was criticized for the speed of the GSTN portal.
