"perhaps better known as the online identity verification service that many states now use to help staunch the loss of billions of dollars in unemployment insurance and pandemic assistance stolen each year by identity thieves"
In the great State of California, billions in unemployment benefits were sent to the wrong people.. because their internal systems were designed to delay, deny and deprive, I say. Actual people with real jobs were repeatedly refused, while insiders who knew how to fill out paperwork, and apparently knew where the blind spots were, filed hundreds of claims in the early pandemic days. A newly appointed Director (young, tech savvy woman) soon stopped making public statements, and the situation nearly two years later, is not resolved. This is at a time when California has record income to the State.
Now, some people may jump on this and say "well, you see how photo ID would have helped that" and, with incomplete knowledge and personal opinion, I say no, it would not solve it. You see, people with real jobs, with every real paper filed, were denied benefits, while insiders were pulling checks with both hands, using certain kinds of identities that would slip through. How would ever more restriction, requirement and verification, have helped here?
I am deeply against the collective government making ever more demands on citizens for "papers, please" enrollment to massive money social services (edit e.g. govt unemployment benefits). It is not going to have the desired effect, despite superficial evidence otherwise. Additionally this represents a slippery slope where the ability to interact as an individual will be eroded, and opportunity for insider graft will increase.
> I say no, [photo IDs] would not solve it. (...) How would ever more restriction, requirement and verification, have helped here?
This almost starts to sound like an Onion article: "No way this can possibly work," Americans saying about yet another system implemented by virtually every nation in the Western World(TM).
The whole point of a national photo ID system is that it's the government's responsibility to provide its every citizen a functional ID. Which has its shortcomings, but it's miles better than everyone implementing their own ID system anyway in incompatible ways and then all citizens trying to figure out which one to use where.
There's a strong parallel with a national healthcare system, which is also objected by a lot of Americans on the ground that the mythical government will never get it right.
The article doesn't mention creating a national identification card in the USA nor does it talk about implementing any kind of nationwide identifier. Instead the on-boarding process for ID.me is described.
In my opinion the poster is correct: uploading one of the many state issued identification cards, all which vary quite a lot, is not going to solve this problem.
I think there's a confusion happening here between photo ID (an identification the government issues to citizens) and being required to submit photos of oneself and other documents to access government services.
It doesnt work here. As a progressive we keep chasing these goals and somehow they simply get perverted to be even worse for the taxpayer in the end. i.e. you must have RealID however you must also pay for RealID. You can get paid time off from work to vote or benefits if you have a job, but only if you're a full time employee. Womp! a ton of people are no longer full time employees
You're barking at the wrong tree. America already has photo IDs. It's state-based, but federalizing it wouldn't change anything relevant to the question. The system in question is in addition to the photo IDs.
It almost looks like you've seen some familiar words and decided to dump your objections to imagined American backwardness compared to Europe, even though the matter in question has absolutely nothing to do with it.
I’d say that there’s a pretty significant gap between “we’ve given you a federal ID for free, and you’re obligated to use it” and “you must provide your own photo ID to access government services, and we may or may not accept it”.
The former is about the government fixing its own mess, the latter foists responsibility for dysfunctional government systems onto individuals who may or may not do the correct song and dance to please whichever agency they’re dealing with. If we’re going to demand photo ID everywhere, the government should fix its own crap first before demanding more of the citizens.
I’d be fine with getting a federal ID and using it for my taxes. I’m deeply opposed to having to provide my own photo to fill out my taxes, especially since if they’re unhappy with my photo for whatever inscrutable reason, they can throw me in jail for not doing my taxes right.
> because their internal systems were designed to delay, deny and deprive, I say.
Definitely. I know someone in NJ who has not received unemployed benefits for 14 months. They call every month, and are told to keep waiting. No one returns their calls, snail mail, or emails.
There is zero justification the government cannot respond via email, or give you a call back, other than they would like you to waste so much of your time and effort on hold that you give up.
I have a *fat* stack of false claims sent into my company in NJ, that the burden was left on me to dispute. Finally the state paid one of these fictitious claims out to someone I have never met in NYC. I contacted my legislators about the situation, tried to get investigators to work the case, contacted the courts who sympathized but were unable to provide assistance. it is impossible to get in contact with someone anywhere to combat fraud. I ended up having to rename the company and change the structure so I would not have to pay into unemployment in the future.
Fast forward to COVID when we were requested to close for a few months and unemployment benefits were supposedly extended to freelancers, I filed for that time we were closed and it was stuck in pending status since April 2020.
I am of the opinion that unemployment insurance as it is in my state is an outright scam and should be abolished (and replaced if need be). New York and Pennsylvania had some delays, but nothing like the shit NJ has been.
You should let them know to contact their state legislator. From what I read on various state subreddits that's the only way to get a response from your overwhelmed state unemployment office. This is the equivalent to escalating your issue to a manager.
> There is zero justification the government cannot respond via email, or give you a call back, other than ...
... that we collectively refuse to pay enough taxes to staff government agencies at sufficient levels to allow them to provide the service we believe we deserve.
Name one thing the state government does for normal people who actually finance the largess. Are you really surprised billions go unaccounted in a place where train robberies are a thing? But don't you worry, a photo ID won't be required in the next election though.
Excuse me, can I see your vaccine card so you can enter this store/restaurant/theater/polling place/etc.?
Minorities, Blacks in particular, have lower vaccination rates than whites. Ever heard of the Tuskegee experiment? Who can blame them? Given vaccine rates by demographic, it seems like many places are hell bent on introducing racist vaccine passport policies. I thought we weren't supposed to do stuff like that anymore.
> In the great State of California, billions in unemployment benefits were sent to the wrong people.. because their internal systems were designed to delay, deny and deprive, I say.
That may be so, but it's at least in part because, irrespective of what they are designed for because their internal systems were notoriously broken and overwhelmed before the pandemic, and the department is a notorious nightmare hellhole work environment that almost everyone whose been around state service avoids and almost everyone who can get out of (within state service, if they have a reason for remaining there more generally) does, leaving mainly the people that can't escape; it's the most consistent source of workload and working conditions conflicts between employee unions and management, and the issues are usually at best temporarily papered over rather than resolved.
Having used ID.me before, I thought their email was a phishing attempt at first, before I looked into the situation and found that it was legit. Government services should never ask users to provide personal information to third parties which lack .gov TLDs; it's very problematic from the perspective of a cautious user.
Can confirm, I know somebody in CA who had the rights to the benefits (not me), and actually getting them was a nightmare. Yet, somehow criminals managed to steal billions. I am torn between gross incompetence (always a good first guess when CA government is involved) and actual collusion with the criminals.
And no, different auth system wouldn't help it. Probably would make it worse - the system would inevitably be buggy, deny entry for people who don't look like their out-of-date photo, glitch on hundreds of systems that are different from whatever the designers assumed, and would require a lot of manual adjustment - while the support workforce will be reduced, because we've got this shiny new expensive automated system, why should we keep paying for human support?
The IRS is a massive social service, because much of US fiscal policy gets done through the tax code via ever-more-complicated tax credits and deductions.
Why not? It’s part of the system of providing services (some direct, like EBT; some indirect, like roads and pollution regulation) that we elect governments to do behalf.
> Actual people with real jobs were repeatedly refused, while insiders who knew how to fill out paperwork, and apparently knew where the blind spots were, filed hundreds of claims in the early pandemic days.
This is simply how every bureaucracy works at all levels. And Unix systems as well :/ Your system comes with cron and tar, you just have to know they exist and how can they be used. And to know that, you just have to read up relevant man pages, and to pull up man pages, you just...
... well I guess you can also hand couple grands to that dude over there mixing a peanut butter jar with fingers who apparently knows how to write a backup scripts and how to run it as a cron job.
I guess it's some sort of unsolved hard problem to make systems that are self sustaining, fair, and easy, that works reliably.
I completely understand the frustration, and I think I agree that there likely aren't simple solutions. But can I ask - do you have any positive suggestions for what could be done differently that would lead to a better overall result? Is your assertion that it would be better to make it easier for both legitimate claims and fraudsters? What sort of legit/fraud claims ratio should we agree upon as a society, and is there any way for us to influence that number, or is this just an impossibly hard problem?
I know that's a lot of questions, but all of them are sincere. I'm legitimately unsure what I should think about this, as well as unsure what you would specifically propose.
In general, for social services the fraudster problem is extremely overblown.
Here in The Netherlands in 2016 we had 120-150 million euros of fraud on 77 billion euros of social service spending. That's less than 0.2%. Divided by the amount of social service recipients, it amounts to 17 euros of fraud per person.
thank you for asking, sorry for the rant-like structure. Whatever is to be done, needs to back off from "surveillance capitalism". In my own experience, failure in government programs is tolerated because everyone involved is on permanent salary.
While there would be a few edge cases when claiming UI after maybe a fire took out your house and files, 99% of the BS would end by creating UI account and login at time of new hire.
Where is some data on these people who knew how to file things like you are saying? Perhaps an examination of this and bringing it to public light will bring some real change?
One example: EDD employee using serving-life-in-prison boyfriend to sign up other prisoners (none of whom are eligible), and kick back money to them.[1]
(Edit) Oh, here's another good one. EDD employee claimed to be Senator Feinstein.[2]
> [..] government making ever more demands on citizens for "papers, please"
Our 12 year old was refused service in a local stationery shop last week because he didn't have proof of vaccination or a negative test with him. He'd been tested three times in school that same week, but had left "his papers" at home.
He was attempting to buy stuff for school. He was furious.
Oh, and in not so many years from now, he'll be old enough to vote.
>" All of American social services seem designed to delay, deny and deprive from some fear of "welfare queens." "
There's also a massive amount of fraud against the social services. Just look at the auditors' reports on the COVID relief money, and you can see the patterns.
Are there other solutions to prevent the billions in stolen identity claims and returns filed each year? The IRS isn't doing this just to be a pain in the ass or make it more difficult for people to file but because there is an actual problem that costs tens of billions every year.
> You see, people with real jobs, with every real paper filed, were denied benefits, while insiders were pulling checks with both hands, using certain kinds of identities that would slip through.
What are the 'certain kinds of identities that would slip through'?
Can anyone with context speak to as why ID.me was chosen instead of Login.gov? SSA made Login.gov its primary identity provider, so I'm curious what the backstory is on IRS' identity story.
EDIT: Follow up question: Is ID.me a shim until there's traction for the USPS to perform in person identity proofing [1] [2] [3] versus ID.me's remote proofing?
The use of a third party means you don’t have to follow the same privacy rules as if the government collected the data themselves.
It’s why the police forces collect data from phone companies rather than collecting it themselves (which they might even be forbidden from doing).
For extra credit: this is a large subsidy to a private company to increase the size of its database; in return it gets to sell the database contents to others as well.
I would really like it much better if a 3rd party private company wasn't the arbiter of my ME-NESS and a potential barrier to a successful tax payment.
> I would really like it much better if a 3rd party private company wasn't the arbiter of my ME-NESS and a potential barrier to a successful tax payment.
SSA is using ID.me for the verification, Login.gov only provides the login/2FA not the actual identity matching AFAIK. My guess is the IRS thought if they are going to have to go with a third party for this anyway, might as well use their login as well.
I know they've used id.me for a while so this might not have been an option back then, but it now looks like login.gov also does identity verification (and my profile on the site does have my SSN and everything).
Under 6 USC 1523: Federal cybersecurity requirements [1], as well as a recent White House Executive Order [2], that would be my interpretation. ~211 federal agency applications support Login.gov, so I have a bit of curiosity in the outliers, especially when public facing.
It looks like (I'm inferring based on a couple different docs) that login.gov offers its own identity verification service (you scan your drivers license or other government ID): https://developers.login.gov/testing/#testing-ial2
I'm not sure why that's not enough, and given login.gov is free(ish) to government agencies, there must be some requirement they are missing. I was promised government SSO, why don't I have it yet?
> an online identity verification service that requires applicants to submit copies of bills and identity documents, as well as a live video feed of their faces via a mobile device.
This looks like a solution you will expect by a small shop which owner hacks some technology together. It sounds ridiculous for any modern government.
Edit: link to the Spanish certificate authority (Fabrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre) https://www.fnmt.es/en/ceres
In India, you can generate a new virtual ID based on aadhar (national ID).
You will need to confirm the virtual id with 2fa on the site. The default is sadly phone OTP for this which I hope changes.
I haven't needed to do video call for kyc. For example, groww (investment app) will pull up your national ID and have you scan your face. It will automatically match the face.
If it fails, then you can connect with a person.
Newer services also use CKYC which means you don't need to do this process again. Just update kyc from the central repo. Your virtual ID can pull your KYC status.
If you need to verify documents, you can use digilocker login to do that. Digilocker contains all the government generated documentation on your name and services can use it to verify you have genuine documents. For example, school certificate.
I was in shock to find that most colleges in US require your school to send a sealed school transcript because they don't have another way to verify the genuineness.
Have you every see postident used by any Government service?
I'd say the German government's solution is to just not offer any digital services in the first place. /s
In reality, they have some things moving, but too little, too late:
- Filing taxes has been pretty much digital only (for some sorts of taxes, at least) for a couple of years now. It's certificate based, where you "order" your certificate via snail mail.
- ID cards have a digital authentication function, but I have yet to see any service using it.
There are some important differences here as in Germany everyone has an official ID card. So there is no insanity like requesting copies of bills there. Stuff like VideoIdent feels a bit silly, but in the end this is somewhat close to how you do that in person, you show someone your official ID card and they take a look at you and try to decide if you look roughly like the person in the photo.
There is an official and modern alternative using the RFID chip in the ID cards, it's not used that widely but it seems like support is getting a bit broader. I tried it for the state pension site, and I could directly access my information there using only my ID card and the PIN for it.
I've just signed up to the equivalent in the uk called government gateway
you have to provide information and details from two of the following: Passport, last tax submission or driving licence
the sign up to the internet healthcare system used by my doctor seemed to be run by a 3rd party (not happy) needed general information and a picture of my passport or driving license. I declined, because it's a third party and I could not be bothered reading the large list of ways they will likely sell your data and partially because I don't need my doctors info online
Who knows if it actually requires a "mobile device", that might just be their way of saying "device with a camera" seeing how all phones (or any I've ever seen) have a front-facing camera. Lowest common denominator and all that...
> either with the camera on a mobile device or a webcam attached to a computer (your webcam must be able to open on the device you’re using to apply for the ID.me account).
I've spent over 6 hours over multiple attempts to try and sign up for the IRS online through ID.me. I did the whole facial scan nonsense and sent pictures of all the IDs it asked. I'm stuck on the verification of my home address. I've sent them at least 4 different documents, one of which I even provided a translation for, but so far I've only failed.
They only seem to accept American documents, and they don't accept anything not in English. It's fecking stupid and aggravating. Especially since the IRS already knows where I live and regularly sends me letters in the mail.
How am I supposed to produce an American, or even English language, document showing my home address? I don't have any American utilities because I don't live in the USA!
But I want to sign up for the IRS online because the US Postal system is so fecked it takes 5 weeks to receive anything from the IRS. A recent letter I got from them letting me know that I had a payment to make arrived after the deadline for payment. I then had to mail a check to them, likely to take another 5 weeks. I haven't received their notice informing me of my penalty for late payment. It's likely in transit. I'm sure I'll be late paying that as well. But WTF am I supposed to do?
I listen to Americans living in the USA complain about the IRS and just laugh. You guys have it easy.
Not just selfies, AI face model. Vendor is Id.me. Already required as of about a month ago for me (my IRS.gov credentials were disabled). Abusive onboarding too, which makes you enter lots of stuff before telling you there will be selfies. I bailed.
I tried going through this procedure a few days ago. The "selfie scan" felt very invasive, and I really wonder how effective it is. I renewed my expired driver's license online, so I didn't get a new photo. The picture from the license that the selfie scan was going off of was a highschool-era photo of me with no beard. It said it was a match though.
I had to use my laptop for the scan since when I was trying it on my phone, it kept telling me that it couldn't find any face.
In the end, I couldn't get verified because I just moved, and all my identification has my old address.
The face identification software in the Apple Photo software was able to correctly identify pictures of my cousins when they were 5 & 7 years old even though all the other photos I have of them in Photos are in their 50s or later. I have no doubt that there are some failed matches (false negatives/positives), but it generally does pretty well, even with my identical-twin brothers. Given that this is consumer-grade stuff and Apple isn't usually considered best of class, presumably the system run for the IRS is better.
Big tech is probably best in class due to total engineering effort and data sets devoted to it compared to something relatively small like id.me . FB, Google & Apple are probably some of the best of the world outside of stuff by the Chinese gov't and their contractors.
I'm wondering if this is more regulatory capture by Intuit? We already know that our tax filing system is largely designed to sell more copies of TurboTax. This sounds like yet more of the same kind of friction Intuit has been lobbying to have set up for years. Does anyone know if TurboTax also has this requirement? (Not that I'd buy it anyway -- boycott Intuit!)
The IRS will just have to get used to dealing with me though mail again, there is absolutely no way I'm going through all that hassle to log into a web site.
Bills are absolutely worthless as a form of identity anyway, there are no security features on those, most of them are printed on standard paper by common laser printers, there is no way one of their call center people in Stinkwater, Florida is going to know what a utility bill from Bloom County, Illinois looks like and be able to determine from a picture if its original or not.
This feels like the right response. I was paying electronically online, but I think that I will go back to sending in my payments using a paper check. I will be sure to include a polite form letter explaining why they have lost the privilege of taking my money electronically. If enough people take this approach, they will probably get their act together in a year or two.
The New York Department Of Taxation has a rule that threatens to fine you if you file a paper return when having the ability to send one electronically. Though to my knowledge they do not actually enforce that rule - just leave lots of warnings around.
Reminds me of those stupid "Must Observe All Warning Signs - State Law" signs that used to be all over Texas highways. I didn't see any my last trip so maybe those are gone finally, but I just passed through the panhandle briefly. They used to be the first thing you would see after crossing the state line, then periodically along all the interstate highways.
Fwiw you can make payments without any account via https://www.irs.gov/payments/direct-pay and also check their status via that page. You just need the account to e.g. get your transcripts.
Readit News
"perhaps better known as the online identity verification service that many states now use to help staunch the loss of billions of dollars in unemployment insurance and pandemic assistance stolen each year by identity thieves"
In the great State of California, billions in unemployment benefits were sent to the wrong people.. because their internal systems were designed to delay, deny and deprive, I say. Actual people with real jobs were repeatedly refused, while insiders who knew how to fill out paperwork, and apparently knew where the blind spots were, filed hundreds of claims in the early pandemic days. A newly appointed Director (young, tech savvy woman) soon stopped making public statements, and the situation nearly two years later, is not resolved. This is at a time when California has record income to the State.
Now, some people may jump on this and say "well, you see how photo ID would have helped that" and, with incomplete knowledge and personal opinion, I say no, it would not solve it. You see, people with real jobs, with every real paper filed, were denied benefits, while insiders were pulling checks with both hands, using certain kinds of identities that would slip through. How would ever more restriction, requirement and verification, have helped here?
I am deeply against the collective government making ever more demands on citizens for "papers, please" enrollment to massive money social services (edit e.g. govt unemployment benefits). It is not going to have the desired effect, despite superficial evidence otherwise. Additionally this represents a slippery slope where the ability to interact as an individual will be eroded, and opportunity for insider graft will increase.
This almost starts to sound like an Onion article: "No way this can possibly work," Americans saying about yet another system implemented by virtually every nation in the Western World(TM).
The whole point of a national photo ID system is that it's the government's responsibility to provide its every citizen a functional ID. Which has its shortcomings, but it's miles better than everyone implementing their own ID system anyway in incompatible ways and then all citizens trying to figure out which one to use where.
There's a strong parallel with a national healthcare system, which is also objected by a lot of Americans on the ground that the mythical government will never get it right.
In my opinion the poster is correct: uploading one of the many state issued identification cards, all which vary quite a lot, is not going to solve this problem.
It doesnt work here. As a progressive we keep chasing these goals and somehow they simply get perverted to be even worse for the taxpayer in the end. i.e. you must have RealID however you must also pay for RealID. You can get paid time off from work to vote or benefits if you have a job, but only if you're a full time employee. Womp! a ton of people are no longer full time employees
How do we find our way out?
It almost looks like you've seen some familiar words and decided to dump your objections to imagined American backwardness compared to Europe, even though the matter in question has absolutely nothing to do with it.
The former is about the government fixing its own mess, the latter foists responsibility for dysfunctional government systems onto individuals who may or may not do the correct song and dance to please whichever agency they’re dealing with. If we’re going to demand photo ID everywhere, the government should fix its own crap first before demanding more of the citizens.
I’d be fine with getting a federal ID and using it for my taxes. I’m deeply opposed to having to provide my own photo to fill out my taxes, especially since if they’re unhappy with my photo for whatever inscrutable reason, they can throw me in jail for not doing my taxes right.
Definitely. I know someone in NJ who has not received unemployed benefits for 14 months. They call every month, and are told to keep waiting. No one returns their calls, snail mail, or emails.
There is zero justification the government cannot respond via email, or give you a call back, other than they would like you to waste so much of your time and effort on hold that you give up.
Fast forward to COVID when we were requested to close for a few months and unemployment benefits were supposedly extended to freelancers, I filed for that time we were closed and it was stuck in pending status since April 2020.
I am of the opinion that unemployment insurance as it is in my state is an outright scam and should be abolished (and replaced if need be). New York and Pennsylvania had some delays, but nothing like the shit NJ has been.
... that we collectively refuse to pay enough taxes to staff government agencies at sufficient levels to allow them to provide the service we believe we deserve.
Name one thing the state government does for normal people who actually finance the largess. Are you really surprised billions go unaccounted in a place where train robberies are a thing? But don't you worry, a photo ID won't be required in the next election though.
Pretty much every democracy in the world has this. Europeans need to show ID to vote.
Minorities, Blacks in particular, have lower vaccination rates than whites. Ever heard of the Tuskegee experiment? Who can blame them? Given vaccine rates by demographic, it seems like many places are hell bent on introducing racist vaccine passport policies. I thought we weren't supposed to do stuff like that anymore.
Dead Comment
That may be so, but it's at least in part because, irrespective of what they are designed for because their internal systems were notoriously broken and overwhelmed before the pandemic, and the department is a notorious nightmare hellhole work environment that almost everyone whose been around state service avoids and almost everyone who can get out of (within state service, if they have a reason for remaining there more generally) does, leaving mainly the people that can't escape; it's the most consistent source of workload and working conditions conflicts between employee unions and management, and the issues are usually at best temporarily papered over rather than resolved.
Deleted Comment
And no, different auth system wouldn't help it. Probably would make it worse - the system would inevitably be buggy, deny entry for people who don't look like their out-of-date photo, glitch on hundreds of systems that are different from whatever the designers assumed, and would require a lot of manual adjustment - while the support workforce will be reduced, because we've got this shiny new expensive automated system, why should we keep paying for human support?
Believe none of what you hear, half of what you read, and everything that you see.
Deleted Comment
This is simply how every bureaucracy works at all levels. And Unix systems as well :/ Your system comes with cron and tar, you just have to know they exist and how can they be used. And to know that, you just have to read up relevant man pages, and to pull up man pages, you just...
... well I guess you can also hand couple grands to that dude over there mixing a peanut butter jar with fingers who apparently knows how to write a backup scripts and how to run it as a cron job.
I guess it's some sort of unsolved hard problem to make systems that are self sustaining, fair, and easy, that works reliably.
I know that's a lot of questions, but all of them are sincere. I'm legitimately unsure what I should think about this, as well as unsure what you would specifically propose.
https://www-rtlnieuws-nl.translate.goog/economie/column/4140...
(Edit) Oh, here's another good one. EDD employee claimed to be Senator Feinstein.[2]
[1] - https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/california-employment-d...
[2] - https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-17/californ...
Our 12 year old was refused service in a local stationery shop last week because he didn't have proof of vaccination or a negative test with him. He'd been tested three times in school that same week, but had left "his papers" at home.
He was attempting to buy stuff for school. He was furious.
Oh, and in not so many years from now, he'll be old enough to vote.
How can you slip through public key cryptography?
* not american here
https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus
Deleted Comment
There's also a massive amount of fraud against the social services. Just look at the auditors' reports on the COVID relief money, and you can see the patterns.
What are the 'certain kinds of identities that would slip through'?
> Actual people with real jobs were repeatedly refused […]
I would also refuse unemployment benefits to people with jobs, real or otherwise. Which one of us is confused, here?
EDIT: Follow up question: Is ID.me a shim until there's traction for the USPS to perform in person identity proofing [1] [2] [3] versus ID.me's remote proofing?
[1] https://about.usps.com/publications/pub364/ch12.html
[2] https://www.cfr.org/report/solving-identity-protection-post-...
[3] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a7b7a8490bade8a77c07...
It’s why the police forces collect data from phone companies rather than collecting it themselves (which they might even be forbidden from doing).
For extra credit: this is a large subsidy to a private company to increase the size of its database; in return it gets to sell the database contents to others as well.
Let the IRS know: https://www.improveirs.org/submit-a-suggestion/
I know they've used id.me for a while so this might not have been an option back then, but it now looks like login.gov also does identity verification (and my profile on the site does have my SSN and everything).
https://login.gov/what-is-login/#:~:text=Some%20agencies%20r... "Some agencies require you to verify who you are"
[1] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...
[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
I'm not sure why that's not enough, and given login.gov is free(ish) to government agencies, there must be some requirement they are missing. I was promised government SSO, why don't I have it yet?
Deleted Comment
This looks like a solution you will expect by a small shop which owner hacks some technology together. It sounds ridiculous for any modern government.
Edit: link to the Spanish certificate authority (Fabrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre) https://www.fnmt.es/en/ceres
You will need to confirm the virtual id with 2fa on the site. The default is sadly phone OTP for this which I hope changes.
I haven't needed to do video call for kyc. For example, groww (investment app) will pull up your national ID and have you scan your face. It will automatically match the face.
If it fails, then you can connect with a person.
Newer services also use CKYC which means you don't need to do this process again. Just update kyc from the central repo. Your virtual ID can pull your KYC status.
If you need to verify documents, you can use digilocker login to do that. Digilocker contains all the government generated documentation on your name and services can use it to verify you have genuine documents. For example, school certificate.
I was in shock to find that most colleges in US require your school to send a sealed school transcript because they don't have another way to verify the genuineness.
I'd say the German government's solution is to just not offer any digital services in the first place. /s
In reality, they have some things moving, but too little, too late:
- Filing taxes has been pretty much digital only (for some sorts of taxes, at least) for a couple of years now. It's certificate based, where you "order" your certificate via snail mail.
- ID cards have a digital authentication function, but I have yet to see any service using it.
There is an official and modern alternative using the RFID chip in the ID cards, it's not used that widely but it seems like support is getting a bit broader. I tried it for the state pension site, and I could directly access my information there using only my ID card and the PIN for it.
you have to provide information and details from two of the following: Passport, last tax submission or driving licence
the sign up to the internet healthcare system used by my doctor seemed to be run by a 3rd party (not happy) needed general information and a picture of my passport or driving license. I declined, because it's a third party and I could not be bothered reading the large list of ways they will likely sell your data and partially because I don't need my doctors info online
Why the F does it have to be a mobile device? Is this another excuse to install a spyware mobile app that tracks your GPS?
Why can't it just be a web-based thing that I can do on any device I want?
I've spent over 6 hours over multiple attempts to try and sign up for the IRS online through ID.me. I did the whole facial scan nonsense and sent pictures of all the IDs it asked. I'm stuck on the verification of my home address. I've sent them at least 4 different documents, one of which I even provided a translation for, but so far I've only failed.
They only seem to accept American documents, and they don't accept anything not in English. It's fecking stupid and aggravating. Especially since the IRS already knows where I live and regularly sends me letters in the mail.
How am I supposed to produce an American, or even English language, document showing my home address? I don't have any American utilities because I don't live in the USA!
But I want to sign up for the IRS online because the US Postal system is so fecked it takes 5 weeks to receive anything from the IRS. A recent letter I got from them letting me know that I had a payment to make arrived after the deadline for payment. I then had to mail a check to them, likely to take another 5 weeks. I haven't received their notice informing me of my penalty for late payment. It's likely in transit. I'm sure I'll be late paying that as well. But WTF am I supposed to do?
I listen to Americans living in the USA complain about the IRS and just laugh. You guys have it easy.
Automatically sign me up for something I don't want to do, then make me use a system I don't want to do (and worked horribly) to unenroll...
I had to use my laptop for the scan since when I was trying it on my phone, it kept telling me that it couldn't find any face.
In the end, I couldn't get verified because I just moved, and all my identification has my old address.
Bills are absolutely worthless as a form of identity anyway, there are no security features on those, most of them are printed on standard paper by common laser printers, there is no way one of their call center people in Stinkwater, Florida is going to know what a utility bill from Bloom County, Illinois looks like and be able to determine from a picture if its original or not.
Reminds me of those stupid "Must Observe All Warning Signs - State Law" signs that used to be all over Texas highways. I didn't see any my last trip so maybe those are gone finally, but I just passed through the panhandle briefly. They used to be the first thing you would see after crossing the state line, then periodically along all the interstate highways.