Glitches in the new Income Tax Portal

The finance ministry awarded INFOSYS, the tender for overhauling the erstwhile e-filing portal of Income Tax and design a more user friendly portal which can enable the taxpayers to file their returns and avail other features more conveniently. Instead, since the onset of the new portal, launched on 07/06/2021, the users have been facing myriad problems while availing features like, return filing for self and as representative, appeal filing in Form 35, response with regards to 139(9), OTP generation issues, login issues, bank validation errors, etc. Though the finance department promises that they are working tirelessly with INFOSYS to mitigate the issues, which seems plausible as practical problems do arise whenever a site is launched, the grievance forum and 24/7 customer care services of the portal have proved to be useless in providing assistance and resolutions to the users, leading to discontent and frustration. Especially for those who cannot file appeals, as upon submission "No response from server" error crops up, the suspense of getting any relief in the deadlines is unbearable as they await further response from the finance or income tax department with humungous amount of tax and penalty looming on their heads. How the finance department, led by Mrs. Nirmala Sitharaman, deal with the situation will be seen in times to come and till then all we can do is wait for updates.