IRS requires user's camera to do “liveness detection” to create an account

Just this weekend, Login.gov was made the primary identity provider for the Social Security Administration [2]. This is a big deal! They get 22 million visitors a month. The IRS was in a bind years ago because of identity fraud around refunds (disclosure: I interviewed with the team who is working to solve this), and ID.me appears to have been selected at the time to meet this need. Login.gov, to my knowledge, does not require liveness detection when submitting a state ID for proofing purposes (at least, it did not when I signed up for Social Security Administration access with my Login.gov account; only my state driver's license was required).

As of a year ago, Login.gov supported roughly ~90 agency websites/applications as an identity provider. As of a month ago, it's ~210. Despite the bureaucratic challenges, progress is being made, and considering that the CEO of ID.me wants to become a private corporation gatekeeper to digital identity services [3] [4], there's a lot of incentive to help government succeed based on the idea that this is infrastructure as a public good.

The question now is: when is IRS going to move to Login.gov as their identity provider and if they don't, why aren't they?

[1] https://billhunt.dev/move-carefully/

[2] https://secure.ssa.gov/RIL/SicaView.action

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/taxnotes/2021/07/12/the-emergin...

[4] https://insights.id.me/press-releases/id-me-raises-100-milli...

> Its target market appears to have been modified over the years, and ID.me’s founder and CEO described his aspirations for the company recently as similar to Visa Inc.’s electronic funds transfer business, but for personal identities.

> The CEO explained the business as a way to reduce friction in logins: “If we already know that you are you, or if we already have other credentials — like you’re a medical provider — here’s all the applications that accept ID.me for login. And you can just open up those applications without being challenged for your password or for identity verification because you’ve already done that. And when you do that, you can save people so much time and money.”

> ID.me hasn’t reached the same level of market saturation that Visa has in the United States, so many taxpayers who claim the child tax credit probably don’t already use the company’s services. In late March, ID.me said it had 39 million users, with more than 70,000 new users signing up each day.

(no affiliation with the federal gov, USDS, GSA, thoughts and opinions are always my own)