The new income tax filing portal crashing within seven hours of its launch has once again exposed the gap between promise and delivery in governance, and the one paying the price for it is the taxpayer.
What followed after the June 7 launch of the new “taxpayer-friendly” portal was that finance minister Nirmala Sitaraman summoned Infosys CEO Salil Parekh for technical glitches and the income tax department extended the e-filing date from July 31 to September 30, 2021.
However, many taxpayers, who would have filed their returns by end-July are confused and have no one to approach, pointed out tax expert and taxpayer educationalist Mukesh Patel. And that is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
In conversation with Vibes of India, Patel explained why the income tax portal’s glitches are cruel joke on the honest taxpaying citizen. Edited excerpts:
Did the government forget the pilot test?
“Income tax had a portal earlier but the government removed everything and introduced a new portal by Infosys. There was no smooth transition. Why did the government want to change everything overnight? All tall promises fell flat. In seven hours of the launch of the portal the site collapsed. It’s been two-and-half months and till date we see no faith in the renewing of the site. Even if the government would have done a pilot test they would have realised that the portal was a failure. And the blame should rest with both: the income tax department, the ministry of finance — the government — and Infosys.”
Loss to the revenue department
“Every day you face issues that were earlier unheard of. Tax payers, tax experts and the income tax department are suffering. When the portal doesn’t work, people can’t pay taxes, and it invariably leads to reduction in the revenue for the government department.
“It’s embarrassing even for the government. There are two filing dates July end for non-audit cases, second filing in October. As far as July is considered, they got an extension till September 30. Barring people who were unable to file their tax, in the early part of August a good number of people filed their tax returns. When the government has given an extension you can’t charge a fine for the delay in filing tax returns but the portal never updated this instruction.
“What happened is the minimum fine of Rs 5,000 got deducted of their refund and went away in the government treasury. Post this comedy of errors, they came up with a notice that the amount will be refunded. If a taxpayer’s delays in paying tax he is fined for it, this time the government or Infosys has made a mistake — they should pay to the taxpayers.”
Guess the cost of the I-T portal
“The government paid taxpayers’ money to cause inconvenience to the taxpayers. This is unacceptable. The Union cabinet on January 16, 2019 gave its approval for this project at an outlay of Rs 4,241.97 crore for a period of eight-and-half years, including payout to the Managed Service Provider (MSP), GST, rent, postage and project management cost. The government paid Rs 164.5 crore to Infosys to build the new income tax e-filing portal between January 2019 and June 2021.”
Loss of data?
“All the earlier records of taxpayers — refunds, e-filing, income — were visible on the portal and all vanished. There is no data in the new portal. Even if the new portal resumes functionality, the main question is do we have back up?”
Taxpayers left in the lurch
“If a consumer has any problems with a product they reach out to a call centre, but in this case the taxpayer can approach neither the income tax department nor Infosys. The faceless assessment process of the income tax is ideally a useful facility as the taxpayer can get his work done digitally but in such unprecedented times, the faceless assessment is a curse as we have none to share our plea. We don’t even have a call number. We are rendered helpless.
“Taxpayers are getting emails that they can go for video conferencing on the portal for assistance in tax filing. They assign us a time and date for the video conferencing and we log on, no one turns up. Irresponsibly, we get an email about postponing the session only after 24 hours of the scheduled time and that too notifying us that we can lodge a complaint about the inconvenience caused on the portal. This is the level of naivety of the income tax department.”
Great analysis of tax payers sentiment. Your concern for tax payer is praiseworthy. God bless you