The government on Monday informed the Lok Sabha that the income-tax return (ITR) e-filing portal has seen a substantial increase in traffic during the ongoing peak filing season, with several key activities nearly doubling compared with the corresponding week last year.
While maintaining that the portal has been functioning in a “largely stable and efficient manner”, it acknowledged that some taxpayers may experience transient technical issues, such as slower page response times or intermittent delays, during periods of peak concurrent load.
The government also disclosed that contractual penalties have been imposed on Infosys under the Integrated e-Filing and Centralised Processing Centre 2.0 project. It said the company was subjected to liquidated damages for failing to deliver the project on schedule in 2020.
In addition, penalties were imposed for failing to meet service-level agreements over 12 quarters, application outages during the peak filing season in FY26, and instances where income-tax return filing deadlines had to be extended for reasons attributable to the service provider.
In a written reply to an unstarred question by Shyamkumar Daulat Barve, Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary provided detailed data on portal activity between July 8 and 14, 2026, compared with the same period in 2025.
ITR filings rose sharply during the period. On July 14, 2026, 1.22 million returns were filed, compared with 409,000 a year earlier. Similar increases were recorded throughout the week, with daily filings ranging between 800,000 and 1.2 million in 2026, against 300,000-400,000 during the corresponding period last year.
The number of logins also increased significantly. On July 14, the portal recorded 9.88 million logins, up from 6.76 million a year earlier. The total volume of key activities, including ITR filings, logins, challan generation, and viewing or downloading Form 26AS, reached 16.1 million on July 14, 2026, compared with 9.53 million in 2025.
The minister said the e-filing portal is a high-volume platform serving crores of taxpayers, with usage rising sharply ahead of statutory deadlines. Its performance is monitored continuously through a dedicated daily and hourly dashboard that tracks logins, ITR filings, AIS redirections, payment gateway status, error codes, and other key indicators. Any technical issue is identified, escalated, and resolved within defined timelines.
To strengthen the system ahead of the filing season, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) upgraded the portal’s infrastructure and increased its capacity to process up to 10 million income-tax returns a day.
According to the government, computing, storage, and network capacity have been enhanced; issues encountered in previous filing seasons have been addressed; a 24×7 monitoring mechanism and a dedicated war room have been set up; cybersecurity measures have been strengthened; and preparedness has been coordinated with stakeholders such as the Unique Identification Authority of India, banks, the Reserve Bank of India, Central Depository Services (India) Ltd, National Securities Depository Ltd, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India to ensure uninterrupted services.
