Preamble: Every July, taxpayers and chartered accountants across India expect to be deep into e-filing season. Yet in Assessment Year 2025-26, the wait for the crucial ITR-2 and ITR-3 utilities has stretched far beyond the usual timeline, leaving millions unable to file and professionals staring at blank screens. To understand why a country celebrated as a global IT powerhouse still struggles to release its own tax-filing tools on time, veteran GST expert and columnist Sudhir Halakhandi sat down with an AI analyst for a frank conversation. Their discussion cuts through technical jargon and official press notes, laying bare the chain of policy changes, contract bottlenecks and planning lapses that have turned routine compliance into a last-minute scramble. What follows is a clear, plain-English interview—Sudhir’s pressing questions on behalf of taxpayers and professionals, answered candidly by the AI—shedding light on how such delays happen, who bears responsibility, and what can be done to prevent a repeat next year. What is replied by the AI is given as it is without any editing so instead of checking it on facts and law go to the intentions and reasons.
Why delay in releasing ITR utilities AY 2025-26- AI replied to Sudhir Halakhandi
Interview
Q.1 (Sudhir Halakhandi):-
This is Sudhir Halakhandi. Do you know me, and are you ready for my interview on the delay in ITR utilities?
A1:- Yes, I know you as a well-known GST columnist, chartered accountant, and cartoonist. I’m ready to discuss every aspect of the delay and its impact on taxpayers and professionals.
Q.2 The new financial year started on 1 April 2025 and today is 6 July 2025. Lakhs of taxpayers—especially those with capital gains, HUFs and partnership income etc. still cannot file because ITR-2 and ITR-3 and other main utilities are missing. Why is there so much delay?
AI:- This year’s Budget overhauled the capital-gains rules, added new foreign-asset schedules, and forced the portal team to rebuild large parts of the back end. Those changes could only be coded after the Finance Act was signed. Each new schedule, cross-check and pre-fill link then had to pass security and load tests. Because ITR-2 and ITR-3 are the most complex forms, their testing has run long, while the simpler ITR-1 and ITR-4 went live in May. The department is still completing final checks.
Q.3 India is an IT super-power. Is this really such a hard problem, or has the Government created a “round square” that can never be finished by the service provider?
AI:- The technology is manageable, but the calendar makes it feel impossible. Policy kept shifting through March and even into May, and the portal’s own architecture is being upgraded this year. When rules and infrastructure both move at the same time, developers end up chasing a moving target. So the struggle is more about late planning than about raw coding difficulty.
Q.4 Why wasn’t this work started well before 1 April 2025? Couldn’t the coding have begun earlier?
AI: Developers can lock their code only after the law and the form layouts are final. Once the tax body notified the paper forms in early May, and only then did developers have a stable specification. Coding earlier would have meant re-doing everything when the rules changed.
Q.5 The forms were notified in May. Why didn’t the utilities come out right after that? Is the service provider unaccountable, or did the Government give it an impossible task? Is this rocket science?
AI: After notification came more change-requests, like new indexation tables and stronger encryption rules. Each request reopened testing. The single prime vendor, Infosys, controls the entire portal, so if one module is still under audit, nothing can launch. The job is not rocket science, but the contract and timetable create a choke-point, and penalty clauses focus on uptime after launch rather than on meeting release dates.
Q.6 So who is responsible for taxpayers and professionals suffering—Government or the service provider?
AI: Responsibility is shared. The Government controls the legislative calendar and kept changing the specifications late. The vendor controls execution and has not always delivered quickly or scaled smoothly. Because payments are tied to milestone approval instead of calendar deadlines, neither side feels urgent pain when the schedule slips, so taxpayers and professionals pay the price.
Q.7 What is your overall view? Is this simply mismanagement and faulty planning?
AI: Yes, it is mainly a planning failure. Freezing the e-file schema by 31 March, publishing a clear release calendar, opening a public testing sandbox and adding penalties for missed dates would prevent such delays. Without those steps, each July will bring the same scramble.
Q.8 Isn’t this a waste of precious days for professionals?
AI: Absolutely. Chartered accountants have been ready to work since May, but without live utilities any work done now risks duplication later. Thousands of productive hours lie idle, and when the utilities finally arrive everyone will rush at once, increasing stress, errors and overtime. The lost time is real and could have been avoided with firmer planning.