The finance ministry has summoned Infosys managing director and CEO Salil Parekh on Monday to explain the persistent glitches in the new income-tax portal that have made it difficult to file returns.

The tax authorities have been forced to reintroduce the manual filing of forms relating to remittances, while extending the last dates for the electronic filing of forms related to intimations by pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.

The new e-filing portal “www.incometax.gov.in”, developed by Infosys, had a bumpy start since its launch on June 7, and it continues to face glitches with users complaining that certain functionalities were either unavailable or working slow.

On Saturday, the portal was put under emergency maintenance by Infosys, who seems unable to resolve the gremlins in the system.

“Ministry of Finance has summoned Salil Parekh, MD & CEO @Infosys on 23/08/2021 to explain to hon’ble FM as to why even after 2.5 months since the launch of the new e-filing portal, glitches in the portal have not been resolved. In fact,since 21/08/2021 the portal itself is not available,” the income-tax department tweeted.

Infosys India Business in a tweet late Sunday evening said that the portal has been brought to service again. “The emergency maintenance of the @IncomeTaxIndia portal has concluded and the portal is live. We regret any inconvenience caused to taxpayers,” the tweet said.

Quoting the I-T department tweet, senior adviser in the ministry of information & broadcasting, Kanchan Gupta, tweeted, “This is the second major GoI project @Infosys has messed up. The first was #GST portal. Now it is #IncomeTax portal. Infosys bags GoI projects using L1 route which limits options. Clearly lacks either capacity or intent to deliver. Two ‘failures’ in a row cannot be coincidence”.

In June, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had met the key officials of Infosys and highlighted the issues faced by taxpayers and tax professionals on the portal.

The finance minister last week had said that the technical glitches in the new e-filing portal will largely be fixed in the next few days and that she has been constantly reminding Infosys about this.

The government had disclosed last month that it had asked for suggestions in respect of the glitches on the portal online.

More than 700 emails detailing over 2,000 issues, including 90 unique issues/problems in the portal were received from various stakeholders including the ICAI, tax professionals and taxpayers.

“The government needs to seriously work it out or they should restart the old portal if possible. People were happy with the working of the earlier portal,” said tax advocate Narayan Jain.

“The non-functioning of features in the new portal have caused immense problems to taxpayers and professionals. The government needs to take urgent steps so that compliance can be made,” he said.