Nirmala Sitharaman hits out at Infosys, Nandan Nilekani for glitches on new new ITR site

NEW DELHI:  In a deja vu of sorts, Union Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday took a dig IT major Infosys and its co-founder and Chairman Nandan Nilekani over technical glitches faced by users who were attempting to file Income tax returns on a new portal which went live on June 7.

Sitharaman tweeted that she could see her complaints on her Twitter timeline on the glitches faced by people barely 12 hours after the portal was launched.

“The much awaited e-filing portal 2.0 was launched last night 20:45 hrs. I see in my TL grievances and glitches. Hope  @Infosys &  @NandanNilekani  will not let down our taxpayers in the quality of service being provided,” the tweet read. 

On Tuesday, taxpayers took to Twitter registering their complaints on the portal running slowly, being unable to open it on mobile handsets, and problems with KYC verifications.

Nilekani responded to Sitharaman’s complaint saying that the new portal will ease the filing process and enhance end-user experience.

“We have observed some technical issues on day 1, and are working to resolve them. Infosys regrets these initial glitches and expects system to stabilise during the week,” he said. 

Sitharaman, during her earlier stint as the Minister of State for commerce and industry, had taken note of Twitter complaints over Infosys’ poor handling of the MCA portal, a six year project that the IT major was allocated in 2012.

In 2019,  Infosys was awarded a Rs 4,242 crore project by the government for creating the Income Tax Department’s centralized processing unit in order to ease the tax filing process by reducing processing time as well as enabling quicker refunds.

Nilekani and his firm have also  come under fire from the government for terrible user experience on portals developed by the IT major.

The finance ministry had communicated to Infosys earlier regarding technical glitches faced by users in the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) portal, a Rs 1,380 crore project.

Niti Aayog chairman, Amitabh Kant had also called out Infosys, for poor user experience faced by corporates.