Hon'ble Sir/Madam,

It has been time and again seen govt websites whether Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), INCOME TAX or GST all crash on the penultimate day. In some cases a day before.

Almost every year since 2006 (project MCA-21 e-Governance ), MCA website has been crashing and predictably it crashed yesterday, preventing stakeholder to even log in.

As if this was not enough, MCA surreptitiously changed the version of Annual Return form hours before 12 midnight deadline and ensured that stakeholder fails to upload return completely (in cases where stakeholder was fortunate enough to log in).

While it is often said, Why wait till the last day? This is good advice though it lacks pragmatism and sensitivity. Compliance is collaborative effort and its successful culmination often borders around the last date.

If it is expected to wrap up pending work one day before, then website shall crash on that day too!

After all what is essence behind the last date ?.

It's built on premise, *when all factors remain constant,* then 12 midnight of that day (since it's e-filing) becomes the RED LINE.

The whole edifice is built on factors facilitating compliance remaining the same. Needless to say, Force Majure conditions have to factored in.

It is this fair play principle which every statutory body must respect.

Sadly, this concept of fairplay is thrown out of the window with impunity.

It also brings our focus of capabilities of Govt websites under backdrop of Digital India.

When spike in the internet traffic is expected, it must be factored in while managing additional load. It's pure management.

Every e-commerce website factors this. In e-commerce cases, they even don't have empirical data. But yet they do their best in scaling up and down by routing additional load to other servers. Amazon and other B2C websites now use cloud base to address this spike.

Here MCA knows the surge and they have ample historic data to preempt the snowbowling of the problem.

I even recall ICSI and ICAI making temporary arrangements on the result day.

Why hasn't the Govt of India addressed this since 2006 ?

In 14 years, what measures has the Govt taken to avoid repeat after repeat under performance or non performance (of websites) on penultimate days of compliance?

It's high time the ICSI and ICAI come together to apprise Govt about this malady plaguing the stakeholders & professionals year on year.

This 2021 let's hope the institutes/ other interest groups-forums to highlight this issue which puts many to unimaginable stress, hardships and despair. Needless to say additional costs along with pandemic induced costs.

Compliance ease is an important limb of Ease of business.

If the Govt of India is sincerely interested in making India an attractive investment destination including for domestic investors, then it's imperative to fix this age hold problem.

We request you considering the current Covid Situation, you are requested to kindly extend the date of CFSS and LLP Settlement Scheme.