Rough Ride For Taxpayers

The portal has faced numerous glitches despite being handled by tech giant Infosys. As taxpayers face hurdles in filing their returns, the government should act fast to sort out this issue

- Shivanand Pandit

His year has witnessed radical changes in the Indian income tax (IT) configuration. One of them is the introduction of the new IT portal. On June 7, with much hullabaloo, the refurbished portal was thrown open by the IT department. However, the gateway remained unreachable for the better section on its debut day. Almost a month later, nothing has changed and taxpayers are progressively becoming impatient.

In May 2021, while publicising the launching of its new e-filing portal— http://www.incometax.gov.in—the IT department mentioned that the new portal will be a “taxpayer-friendly portal”. It also stated that the portal would facilitate the processing of IT returns and help in issuing rapid refunds to taxpayers. Plus, all communication, uploads and unresolved activities would be shown on a single dashboard, it claimed. Additionally, to assist taxpayers, the software for preparing tax returns would be incorporated in the portal along with a new call centre for quick reaction to inquiries.

The prime reason for introducing the new portal was to have a gateway with elementary configuration and easy use. Therefore, the government entrusted the task to tech giant Infosys. In 2019, the entity was given the contract to develop the new IT portal in order to decrease the processing tenure from 63 days to one day. The total expenditure was Rs 4,200 crore.