Infosys' deadline to fix tax filing portal is September 15. India's tax deadline is 15 days after

Indian IT major Infosys, which crossed the $100 billion mark in terms of market capitalisation on Tuesday, has just about three weeks to maintain its reputation. The finance ministry summoned Salil Parekh, the chief executive officer of Asia’s second-largest software service provider, asking him to explain why glitches in the nation’s new electronic tax filing portal have not yet been fixed.

Since the portal went live on June 8, taxpayers have faced technical glitches, errors and challenges in accessing the portal or several functions within the website, drawing their ire as well as that of the finance ministry.

According to a TOI report, finance minister did "tough talking with the CEO", underlining the importance her government attaches to the project, and made it clear that Infosys did not seem to understand the enormity of the report. Infosys has time till September 15 to get the system right.


On Sunday evening, Infosys tweeted that the portal — down for maintenance over the weekend — was operational again for users. “The emergency maintenance of the @IncomeTaxIndia portal has concluded and the portal is live. We regret any inconvenience caused to taxpayers,” Infosys said.

On Saturday, Infosys tweeted that the portal was inaccessible due to “planned maintenance,” which it changed to “emergency maintenance” on Sunday morning.

The finance minister and officials from the Department of Revenue had a detailed interaction with the company’s top brass to resolve the matter earlier as well. The meeting, which included tax practitioners, highlighted several glitches with regard to services on the e-filing portal’s 2.0 version.

These included its slow loading speed, absence of previously saved forms of earlier assessment years, digital signature certificates not getting updated, tedious filing of tax deducted at source (TDS) returns, slow downloading of ITR forms and issues with information on the TDS that had been deducted. Filing of income tax forms for deducting tax on payments made to non-residents was also problematic.

The Centre, the report added, is hopeful that over the next three weeks, Infosys will more than make up for the shortcomings, given the intense scrutiny, which will not go unnoticed among companies that are its clients. While the Central Board of Direct Taxes has refused to address questions around how it failed to spot the problems before the launch, there is recognition in the government that Infosys and the officers dealing with the high-profile project did not undertake the required level of user interface testing.

In January 2019, Infosys emerged as the lowest bidder for the ?4,242 crore contract for the integrated e-filing and central processing centre project, to be deployed and managed for about nine years. So far, the government has paid Infosys Rs 164.5 crore for the project, minister of state for finance Pankaj Chaudhary told Parliament last month.