Over 3-cr taxpayers transact on new I-T portal

Bengaluru: IT services major Infosys on Thursday said that over three crore taxpayers have successfully completed transactions and close to 1.5 crore income tax returns were filed in the new income tax portal developed by the company.

This disclosure came against the backdrop of the IT company being asked by the finance ministry to fix issues faced by the new portal after facing glitches since going live on June 7 this year.

"Over the last few weeks, the portal has seen steady increase in usage with taxpayers' concerns being progressively addressed. Even as the portal makes sustained progress with crores of taxpayers successfully performing transactions, the company acknowledges the difficulties some users continue to experience and is working expeditiously, in collaboration with the Income-Tax Department, to further streamline end-user experience," the company said in an statement on Thursday.

Giving an update on the filing of various returns, Infosys said that in September, on average of more than 15 lakh unique taxpayers have logged into the portal on daily basis and over 1.5 crore returns have been filed till date. Over 85 percent of taxpayers who have filed their returns have also completed their e-verification, largely through Aadhaar OTP authentication, it said.

"The portal is facilitating over 2.5 lakh returns filing on a daily basis and ITR 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 are now available for filing. A majority of the statutory forms have also been made available online," the company added.

It however, added that the company has been engaging with more than 1200 taxpayers directly to better understand their concerns which would help the company to make steady progress. It has currently deployed more than 750 resources on this project to complete significant portions of work, in collaboration with officials from the Income Tax Department.

In January 2019, Infosys was given the contract to develop the new income tax filing portal in a bid to ease the tax filing process. However, the portal, which went live on June 7, has been facing persistent technical glitches since its launch.It has been directed by the Finance Ministry on a few occasions to fix the glitches and last time was asked to make the portal ready by September 15.

During the post Q1 results announcement last month, Infosys CEO Salil Parekh has also said that fixing the problem faced by the income tax portal remained the single largest priority for the company.