ITR Portal Outages Penalty in FY26: The government has said that Infosys was fined in FY 2025-26 because problems on the income tax e-filing portal helped force a deadline extension. Infosys works as the managed service provider for the tax department’s portal. In a reply in the Lok Sabha on July 20, 2026, Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary said, “MSP is liable for penalty if the due date of ITR filing or any other pre-notified date gets extended on account of any reasons attributable to the MSP. Penalty on this count has been imposed upon the MSP in FY 2025-26,”.
Chaudhary said the portal serves crores of taxpayers and usually faces the heaviest load near the filing deadline. He added that some people may still face short technical problems when traffic rises sharply. He said, “Given the high scale of concurrent access in the peak filing period, some taxpayers may, at times, experience transient technical issues such as slower page response or intermittent delays during periods of peak concurrent load,”
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Other Penalties and Past delays
The government also said Infosys had faced other penalties before this. One of them was linked to the delay in the IEC 2.0 rollout, also called the Integrated E-Filing and Centralized Processing Centre 2.0 project. The ministry said the work was not finished on the original schedule. It also said penalties were imposed for 12 quarters because service-level performance scores were not met. These lapses included outages and other operational problems on the portal.
Chaudhary also said the MSP was penalised in FY 2025-26 for application outages on the e-filing portal during the busy filing period. The government said these issues were serious because the portal is a key digital service used by taxpayers for filing returns and other tax work.
Why the Portal is Under Pressure?
The minister said the e-filing system is a large digital platform and traffic rises quickly before the due date. He said the portal is being watched all the time through a daily and hourly dashboard. That dashboard tracks logins, returns filed, AIS and compliance portal redirections, payment gateway status, error codes and other signs of how well the system is working. He also said every technical issue is taken up for quick identification, escalation and fix.
The reply also said the portal has been handling a growing load year after year. Chaudhary said the department is still taking steps to keep the system stable during the peak filing season. The main point of the government’s answer was clear. It wants the portal to keep working well, and it has said the service provider can be penalised when failures cause delays in ITR filing dates.
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Activities on e-filing portal in 2025 and 2026
When is your due date for filing your ITR?
- ITR-1 and ITR-2 (Salary and capital gains income): 31st July 2026
- ITR-3 and ITR-4 (Business income – Non-audit cases): 31st August 2026
- ITR-3 and ITR-4 (Business income – Cases requiring audit): 31st October 2026
- Businesses requiring transfer pricing reports (international transactions or specified domestic transactions): 30th November 2026
- Belated Return: 31st December 2026
- Revised Return: 31st March 2027
- Updated Return (ITR-U): 31st March 2031 (within 4 years from the end of the relevant Assessment Year)
