The last day of filing income tax returns turned to be anxious and chaotic for most auditors and assessees as the Income Tax Department’s website failed to respond. This has led to the department extending the deadline to August 5.
While glitches started from late Sunday night, from as early as 8 a.m. on Monday, the website was not responding, giving jitters to most assessees who had kept the income tax filing to the last day.
Terming the breakdown in the IT returns filing as “unprecedented,” G.V. Rajeev, a partner in M.A. Narasimhan & Co (Chartered Accountants), said: “We have been trying to file returns since morning, but have not been able to do so. In the past, website on the last day would be slow, but never like this.” He said that though the the website was erratic till Saturday evening, it has not responded since Monday morning.
T. Venkatesh Babu, a businessman, said that he was unable to file the returns despite trying for most of Monday morning and afternoon. “I gave up on filing the returns today. I will do it next week and hope the Finance Ministry extends the deadline.”
Meanwhile, sources in Income Tax Department, Bengaluru, said that they were still assessing the problem that had plagued the website. The IT Department's Centralised Processing Centre (CPC) that receives the returns from across the country and where it is processed, had informed the Director General (Systems), and officials there were hoping for an early resolution. When questioned on what the specific problem in the system was, an IT official said that they were still working to find out the issue.