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Quick Reality Check of New Website (e-Filing Portal) of Income Tax Department 

Let us do a quick Reality Check of the New Website of Income Tax Department and See if the Experiment was Worth Doing!!

1. Promise: Immediate Processing of ITRs.

Reality: Site crashed on first day. Past Filed ITRs are not getting reflected on Dashboard. Those reflected in e-Filing Tab are not downloadable.

In Earlier Site, all the ITRs were readily accessible and downloadable in ‘My Account Tab’

2. Promise: All Pending Actions on Single Dashboard

Reality: Dashboard does not show Past filed Returns or Forms or Any Tax Notice (Assessment/Appeal or Penalty). Yes it does show a bar graph of taxes paid in previous and current financial year.

In Earlier Site: All the pending actions were readily reflected under the tab ‘Worklist’.

3. Promise: Free of Cost ITR Preparation Software:

Reality: Only Simple ITR Form 1 (Sahaj) and Form 4 available in online filing mode. Remaining complicated ITR Forms 2, 3, 5 & 6 are still required to be filled in offline mode first, then XML to be generated and then uploaded in the utility.

Earlier Site also provided the same.

4. Promise: New Call Centre and Chat box for immediate assistance to taxpayers.

Reality: Existence & Effectiveness of Call Centre is still to be seen. The available Tax Genie Chat box displays only prefilled questions and bombards with all kinds of pre-filled FAQs. In reality it is not an AI. It simply picks up the keywords and displays the prefilled FAQs.

In Earlier Site also there were numerous Help & FAQs sections very similar to this Chat box.

5. Promise: Mobile App

Reality: As of now, even web version is not working, apps functioning is a far-fetched imagination.

6.  Promise: Online Tax Payment through IT site only.

Reality: Yes, when it comes to tax payments, these people are really serious and walk their talk. Imagine now you paying your taxes through credit card also carrying an expensive interest cost.

Though the Tax Payment Window was not added directly in the Earlier Site, but then a simple googling was sufficient to open the tax payment challans pages which are now consolidated in the IT Site Homepage.

Team TaxAaram sincerely hope and wish that the concerned IT authorities and Infosys (the vendor for this updated site) will take due consideration and cognizance of the above and do the needful in a timely manner so as to make this new experiment smoother, simpler and smarter in real sense. 

Recently the Karnataka Taxpayers Association (KTA) in its Press Note dated 10.6.2021, has claimed that this new e-Filing Portal of the Income Tax Department has costed Rs. 4242 crores.