The only way Americans can create an account with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) starting by the summer of 2022 to access their tax returns and pay their taxes online would be by enrolling in a third-party facial recognition company.
The IRS is essentially mandating Americans to submit their personal data to a private company in McLean, Virginia – including a live video of their face from a cell phone or computer webcam – to create the new kind of digital identification they’ll be needing.
Apart from the privacy issues, this might prove difficult for people with older hardware or who don’t have access to one.
The tax authority noted that even citizens who are already registered with a username and password on its website IRS.gov will have to provide the identity verification company ID.me a copy of a utility bill, a scan of any government-issued ID, details about their mobile phone service, and – a selfie.
According to Brian Krebs, an investigative journalist who went through the account-creating procedure himself, applicants are required by the service to provide a way lot more information than those typically requested for online verification schemes.
It also takes a lot more time to go through the process since the phone verification requires a mobile or landline number – voice-over-IP services like Skype are not acceptable – and in Krebs’s case, it required a live chat since his verification process stalled.
Krebs also got a note informing him of the possibility of waiting for over three and a half hours for someone from the service to contact him.
IRS claims that ID.me is a trusted technology provider of identity verification services and its credentials are already used by more than half of US states to identify fraudulent benefits applications.
The ID.me account can be used to also access other government agencies, such as the Social Security Administration where facial ID is already mandated for the users, but which also allows them to use ID.me’s chief competitor Login.gov, a government-provided identity service.
Texas GOP Congressman Troy Nehls, commenting on the IRS novelties, stressed that the tax agency must remember it is in America, not in China.
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