“Over the past few weeks, the portal has seen a steady increase in usage with the concerns of taxpayers being progressively addressed. Thus far, more than 3 crore taxpayers have logged into the portal and successfully completed various transactions. Here Even as the portal makes steady progress with crores of taxpayers transacting successfully, the company acknowledges the difficulties that some users continue to experience and is working fast in collaboration with Income tax department, to further streamline the end-user experience,” the company said in a statement.
Infosys is committed to make rapid progress and has currently dedicated over 750 resources for this project to complete the significant portion of the work in collaboration with the officials of Income Tax Department. The government had set September 15 as the deadline to plug the loopholes in the portal.
On an average, more than 15 lakh specific taxpayers have logged into the portal daily during the month of September and more than 1.5 crore returns have been filed so far. It added that more than 85 per cent of the taxpayers who have filed their returns have also completed their e-verification, mainly through Aadhaar OTP authentication.
The portal is facilitating the filing of over 2.5 lakh returns on a daily basis and ITR 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 are now available for filing. Most of the statutory forms are also made available online. Many important statutory forms like 15G, 15H, EQ1, 10A, 10E, 10IE, DTVSV, 15CA, 15CB, 35 as well as TDS returns are being filed in large numbers. More than 11.5 lakh statutory forms and more than 8 lakh TDS returns have already been filed. Taxpayer services such as e-Proceedings, response to notices and demands, e-PAN services, DSC registration, and functionality for legal heirs have also been enabled. Over 16.6 lakh e-PANs have been allotted. The company said that 4.3 lakh DSC registrations and over 3.44 lakh e-action responses to notices have also been completed.
Infosys recognizes the challenges being faced by some users and has directly engaged with over 1200 taxpayers to better understand their concerns. The company is focused on rapidly resolving these challenges by working closely with the Chartered Accountant community to ensure that a comprehensive set of user scenarios are supported and fully tested prior to deployment goes.
The portal, which went live on June 7, has been battling technical glitches since its launch, with the finance ministry as well as taxpayers expressing their concerns on the social network. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had met Infosys CEO Salil Parekh and set a deadline of September 15 to resolve all pending issues. The government has also extended the last date for filing returns till December 31.
In January 2019, Infosys emerged as the lowest bidder and won a contract worth Rs 4241.97 crore for the Integrated E-Filing and Central Processing Center project, to be deployed and managed for 8.5 years. Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Choudhary told Parliament that so far the government has paid Rs 164.5 crore to Infosys for the portal project.