NEW DELHI: With the return filing deadline looming, will Infosys, the technology vendor for the income tax portal, be able to meet the September 15 deadline fixed by the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman to provide a hassle free platform?
Although the tech giant is yet to comment on the issue, government officials believe that given the multiple issues, it’s a challenging task and CEO Salil Parekh will have to really get his act together to deliver on the promise he gave to the finance minister and her team on Monday.
“You fix one issue, something else comes up. There seem to be fundamental flaws with the way it has been put together,” a government source told TOI.
Another source said that over the weekend, the site was unavailable for longer than what was anticipated.
While several issues have been flagged, the growing impatience stems from Infy’s inability to adequately respond to it over the last two-and-a-half months.
On Monday, Parekh was pulled up after being “summoned”, following the portal’s outage over the weekend. By all accounts, the CEO of the company — now valued at $100 billion — appeared to be at unease.
The minister is said to have underlined the importance the government attaches to the project and made it clear that Infosys did not seem to understand the enormity of the situation.
Officials suggested that the IT major had not been taking the repeated requests from government officials seriously, resulting in what they described as “less than adequate response” to rid the portal of the snags.
Parekh was a little surprised when he was confronted by a large media contingent waiting outside North Block and the company, which was planning to issue a statement after the meeting, has chosen to remain silent.
The government is, however, hopeful that over the next three weeks, Infosys will more than make up for the shortcomings, given the intense scrutiny, which will not go unnoticed among companies that are its clients.
While the Central Board of Direct Taxes has refused to address questions around how it failed to spot the problems before the June 7 launch, there is recognition in the government that Infosys and the officers dealing with the high-profile project did not undertake the required level of user interface testing.
