Government has said that more than two crore income tax returns have been filed on new portal
Just a day after Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said that the e-filing portal for income tax returns is making “steady progress” and that taxpayers’ concerns are being addressed, the government on Thursday said that more than two crore income tax returns (ITRs) have been filed through it till date and the platform has “substantially stabilised”.
Urging tax payers to file their returns for the fiscal 2020-21 at the earliest, the last date for which is December 31, 2021, the income tax department in a statement said that more than 1.70 crore returns have been e-verified and of these, 1.49 crore were done through Aadhaar based one-time password (OTP) system.
The process of e-verification through Aadhaar OTP and other methods is important for the department to commence processing of the ITR and to issue refunds, if any.
Of the verified ITRs 1 and 4, more than 1.06 crore ITRs have been processed and over 36.22 lakh refunds for the AY 2021-22 have been issued. Processing of ITRs 2 and 3 will be taken up shortly, the department said.
The new e-filing portal was launched on June 7 this year and soon after, users had started complaining of glitches, which led to the finance ministry summoning Infosys officials (the company has designed the portal) and asking it to fix the issues.
Due to these problems, the government had to extend the deadline for filing returns twice.
However as problems persisted with the platform, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had called Mr Parekh and gave the company time till September 15 to address concerns of taxpayers.
Though nothing was heard about the issue after that, during Infosys’ second quarter financial results declaration, Mr Parekh on October 13 said that the portal was making “steady progress” and all concerns are being “progressively addressed”.
He however did not give any indications as to by when the technical issues will be fully resolved.
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