ITR portal: Govt says managed service provider was penalised in FY26 for outages and due date extension

The government had imposed a penalty on the managed service provider (MSP) that operates the income tax department’s e-filing portal in FY 2025-26 after technical glitches led to the extension of the ITR filing deadline.

“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 F.Y. 2025-26,” the Union Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary said in a written response to a query in the Lok Sabha on July 20, 2026.

Other penalties imposed on the MSP

Besides the penalty imposed in FY 2026 for portal outages and the extension of a due date, Chaudhary also said the government had taken several other actions against the MSP for delays and performance-related lapses. These include:

• Service-level performance: The government imposed penalties for 12 quarters after the MSP failed to meet prescribed service-level performance scores, including prolonged outages and operational lapses. Service Levels Score are measured on quarterly basis.
• Portal outages: The MSP was also penalised in FY 2025-26 for application outages on the e-filing portal during the peak filing period.

Why a ITR deadline extension is unlikely this year?

The MoS Finance said the e-filing portal of Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) is a high-volume digital platform, servicing crores of Indian taxpayers, generally with usage rising sharply in the days preceding statutory due dates.

“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,” Chaudhary said in his written response.

He added that despite the substantial increase in load, e-filing portal has been functioning in a largely stable and efficient manner during the ongoing peak filing period. The government is also taking the following measures:

• The e-filing portal’s performance is being being monitored on a continuous basis through a dedicated daily and hourly monitoring dashboard that is tracking login, income tax returns filed, Annual Information Statement (AIS) or compliance portal redirections, payment gateway status, error codes and other operational indicators.
• Any technical issue on the portal reported is taken up for time-bound identification, escalation and resolution.

Activities on e-filing portal in 2025 and 2026

Chaudhary also said that the income-tax portal has been witnessing a constant increase in load over the years, which is evident from the following data of certain important activities during the last one week (8-14 July 2026) and the corresponding period of 2025: