New Income Tax Site
In order to submit income tax returns (ITR), Amit (renamed) opened an electronic filing site on June 9, 2021. However, if you click the login here button, a message will appear on the screen: Please visit the new electronic filing portal “incometax.gov.in”.
Then, you opened a new e-application site by carefully entering the URL. Out of curiosity about the new website, I checked the homepage to learn more about the new features and watched a video with instructions for the new portal.
After logging in, the login page is not displayed for a long time. Amit uses its WiFi hotspot for 1 mobile phone at 5GB per day, and you will usually find that this is enough for your work from home (WFH) and social media sites. However, to his disappointment, Amit received reports that 50% of its high-speed 1.5 GB quota was used up within minutes of launching a new electronic registration site.
Not only was Amit unable to log in and submit his income tax returns (ITR), but his efforts to submit it to the ITR also severely hit his WFH.
CA Karan Batra, the founder and CEO of CharteredClub.com, expressed his opinion:
“In the peak season, there are so many bugs and mistakes in the construction of such a large website. So this is not something that will be appreciated by the taxpayers”.
“May to October is income tax season. The website is busy during the peak season, and the income tax website has very few visits from November to April,” Bartra said, adding, “People also hope to file their ITR for the following reasons:-
- To avoid delayed tax payment (no tax deduction, current interest rate of 1 per month).
- Some of them want to get a housing loan that requires ITR.
Noting the timing of the website launch, Batra said, “I think it was updated at the wrong time. This is a busy season, and a lot of taxpayers are going to have problems. Had they done it in the off-season, it would have been easy for testing, and they would’ve even uploaded tutorial videos.”
“Private income tax programs will also stop working as they will begin the software update process once the income tax website is fully updated,” Batra said.
As the deadline for employers to issue Form 16 has been extended to July 15, 2021, employee registration has not been restored. As most taxpayers submit their documents before the deadline ITR, so the electronic filing site bears its maximum load before the tax return submission date.
This usually results in an extension of the deadline. Therefore, if the latest electronic filing website with the largest load in the future is in this state, then the taxpayer will be close to September 30, 2021. Submitting a declaration before the extended declaration deadline may be a nightmare unless it is extended.
So if this is the state of the newest e-filing site with the highest usage, it can be a nightmare for taxpayers to file near the extended due date of September 30th, 2021, unless it gets more widespread.
