Address issues without further loss of time: Sitharaman to Infosys on new tax portal

New Delhi: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has expressed her disappointment over the glitches in the new Income-Tax portal at a meeting with Infosys officials. Ms Sitharaman asked Infosys -- which was represented by its chief Salil Parekh and senior executive Praveen Rao -- to work on the tax portal to make it "more humane and user-friendly", the finance ministry said in a statement.

She also expressed "deep concern on the problems being faced by the stakeholders in the new portal which was expected to provide a seamless experience to taxpayers". Infosys was asked to "address all issues without further loss of time, improve their services, redress grievances on priority as it was impacting taxpayers adversely", the statement read.

Acknowledging the technical issues, the Infosys team  shared the status of the resolution on issues highlighted by stakeholders. They informed the company was working to fix the technical issues and have augmented the resources for execution of the project on the hardware as well as the application side. Some issues have already been identified and fixed teams were working on the rest.

Infosys had designed the new portal, which was found to have several technical issues after it started service on June 7. The trouble areas included even simple tasks like profile updation or change of passwords. Many users also said the portal was extremely slow and logging in took considerable time.  

As taxpayers complained about inconvenience, tweeting screenshots to the finance minister, she forwarded them to  Nandan Nilekani, the non-executive Chairman of Infosys.  The government said it has also sought inputs from stakeholders.

Mr Nilekani had said his company "regrets these initial glitches" and that the system will stabilise within a few days.