Sitharaman calls out Infosys over glitches in Income Tax e-filing portal

'Hope @Infosys & @NandanNilekani will not let down our taxpayers,' she said in a sharp response

Infosys on Tuesday came under attack from Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman after many users took to Twitter complaining of technical glitches on the new Income Tax e-filing portal, which went live on June 7.

Sitharaman tagged both Infosys and its chairman Nandan Nilekani seeking a resolution from the company for users' "grievances and glitches" after her Twitter timeline was flooded with complaints of unreponsive servers and snags.

“The much awaited e-filing portal 2.0 was launched last night at 20:45hrs. I see in my TL grievances and glitches. Hope @Infosys & @NandanNilekani will not let down our taxpayers in the quality of service being provided. Ease in compliance for the taxpayer should be our priority,” the Finance Minister tweeted.

Infosys was awarded the contract in 2019 at an outlay of Rs 4,242 crore.

Coming to the company's defense, former Infosys executive Mohandas Pai said that a new portal takes time to settle down. "Every large system like this will have issues! Most are at the users side too, takes time to settle down! User education, data input, data population,comments on design, etc takes time to settle down!" he wrote.

Infosys had also developed the GST Network (GSTN) portal, used for GST payment and return filing. The software major had faced flak for slow functioning of the GSTN portal.

(With agency inputs)