ITR Filing 2026: Government Details Measures To Handle E-Filing Portal Load

With the income tax return (ITR) filing deadline approaching, the Income Tax Department’s e-filing portal is back in focus amid preparations for the peak filing season. The government has said it has taken a series of technical and structural measures to strengthen the portal and enhance its capacity.

In a written reply in Parliament, Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary said portal activity has increased significantly during this year’s filing season. ITR filings rose from 8.39 lakh on July 8 to 12.22 lakh on July 14, while logins increased from 80.79 lakh to 98.87 lakh. The total number of activities carried out on the portal also climbed from 1.32 crore to 1.61 crore during the period.

Chaudhary added that the surge in concurrent users during the filing period may sometimes lead to temporary technical issues, including slower page response or intermittent delays for some taxpayers.

What Measures Has The Government Taken

To handle the increased load during the filing period, the e-filing ecosystem has been strengthened and performance-tested to support peak filing volumes, with a validated capacity to handle up to 1 crore ITRs per day.

The government said infrastructure capacity has been enhanced across computing, storage, memory, network and bandwidth, with hardware and software upgrades implemented to improve system stability and performance. It added that major infrastructure issues identified during earlier filing seasons have been rectified.

A 24x7 monitoring framework, including a dedicated War Room, has also been established for proactive monitoring and faster resolution of issues. The minister noted that security infrastructure has been upgraded with stronger protection against DDoS and bot attacks during the peak filing period.

It also said operational readiness has been strengthened through coordination with external stakeholders, including UIDAI, banks, RBI, CDSL, NSDL and ICAI, to ensure uninterrupted service delivery during the filing season.

What Penalties Were Imposed On The MSP

The reply also highlighted the penalties imposed on the managed service provider (MSP) of the e-filing portal. The MSP was required to deploy the IEC 2.0 project in July 2020, but could not deliver it within the scheduled timeline, that leads to the imposition of liquidated damages.

Other penalties were also imposed for lower service-level performance over 12 quarters, application outages during the peak filing period in FY 2025-26, and delays that resulted in extensions of ITR filing deadlines due to reasons attributable to the MSP.