back to article Infosys admits it still hasn't fully fixed Indian tax portal

Infosys has admitted it has missed the Indian government's deadline to fix the tax portal it built, but which has been a glitchy mess since its June 2021 launch. The portal was introduced to make filing taxes more efficient. It delivered the opposite – India's government was forced to extend filing deadlines amid user …

  1. lglethal Silver badge
    Go

    Nope, nope, nope...

    They don't say that 750 People are working on it. They say 750 "resources" are working on it. A computer is a resource, The janitor is a resource, Against all evidence, Management can count as a resource. Dont be fooled into thinking that just because they say 750 resources are working on it, that that means 750 people are involved. Or at least dont be fooled into thinking that means 750 coders are working on it.

    Plus any firm that would refer to workers as "resources" is giving you a very good view of just how much they value their employees. If you needed more evidence to avoid Infosys like the plague, I'd say that is one huge red flag, right there...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nope, nope, nope...

      They mean coders. Computers, managers, janitorial staff and such have actual value to them. To be specific, it means "clueless graduates who know a bit of java, have been drilled on pain of death in trotting out the company line at all times and have had a two-day cross-training session in whatever this is".

      Disclaimer: I might have worked with their idiot, robotic sheep in the past and learned this the hard way.

    2. ColinPa Silver badge

      Re: Nope, nope, nope...

      One project I was on in India has a team of 8+ people for the software I was involved in. One person doing the work - the other 7 "learning". Only the team leader could make changes. In theory I could only talk to the team leader. I managed to start working with others in the team, and found some knew almost nothing - they were there for "education" (and charging) two seemed very competent. I suggested they could do some of the backlog - but the team leader said no!

      The had not thought of having different people working on different problems.

      Their management review of the project was a discussion on the size and colour of the fonts on the charts!

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nope, nope, nope...

      I don't know... I somehow stumbled through some youtube videos last week, eventually ending up to some Indian channel showing repairs to trucks/heavy equipment.

      And in these videos, you'd see 10 people manually laboring over removing axles and gearboxes and the like... and think, in America - that'd take one person with proper tools. (The least impressive part, if I could remember only one, was where they used match sticks to help set backlash in a gearbox...)

      So, while they throw out a big number on "resources"... those "resources" may actually be coders and IT drones, because they have to throw that many to come to a solution that smaller group of properly trained people should be able to do.

      Living in a country where IT has been outsourced to India (and now even lower wage countries) for years and years and years, their support has always been a shitshow. Do we think that somehow they saved all the smart "resources" to work on domestic tasks?

  2. elsergiovolador Silver badge

    Advantage

    One advantage of the fact that our Chancellor's wife owns now reported over £600 million worth of shares in Infosys, is that it would probably be one step too far if Infosys started working on "improving" HMRC infrastructure.

    1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

      Re: Advantage

      Actually, I wonder if this has something to do with this:

      UK chancellor Rishi Sunak drawn into Narayana Murthy Amazon's tax row

      Not saying it's connected ;-) ;-) ;-)

  3. AMBxx Silver badge
    FAIL

    Back to paper?

    At what point does it become more efficient to revert to paper systems?

  4. Sigmund Fraud

    The previous portal was battle tested, was pretty good and was created and maintained by TCS. Dunno why they went with a rewrite. Why break something that was working. Maybe there is an IT Industrial complex.

  5. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    FAIL

    "said article or opinions expressed in it should not be linked with the RSS"

    Sorry, if you publish it, you cannot then pretend that you did not approve it.

    You're not FaceBook, YouTube or a blog platform. You do not have the excuse that you don't know what your users publish. You're a journal and you are responsible for what you publish.

    If you do not want to be their mouthpiece, then don't publish their bullshit.

  6. Howard Sway Silver badge

    working expeditiously to further streamline end-user experience

    Simply the best attempt I've seen to describe desperately attempting to fix a broken system, whilst trying too hard not to admit it's broken.

  7. JohnG

    Could Infosys outsource the portal problems to some experts abroad?

  8. Abominator

    So they are terrible when they work on projects for western companies. Turns out they are just as bad back home.

  9. Sparkus

    population of India @ 1,396,531,521 divided by a claimed 30,000,000 transactions yields an 'engagement' rate of what, 2 percent (assuming my own aged vision hasn't crossed up the decimal point)

  10. FozzyBear
    IT Angle

    At the time of writing, the politicians who lined up to give Infosys a kicking over the affair remain silent on social media. But individual taxpayers continue to complain.

    Ah so....

    Politicians have been sufficiently paid off to be quiet. Any fines, legal action or political fall out has been smothered.

    Efficient use of "resources" indeed

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