IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access | Hacker News Reader

IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access

krebsonsecurity.com

314 pointstodsacerdoti428 comments

American here

"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.

> while insiders were pulling checks with both hands, using certain kinds of identities that would slip through

How can you slip through public key cryptography?

* not american here

What public key cryptography?

I guess OP, like me, is from a country where we have a digital signature installed in our computers or a physical smart card+reader with which you can make many official legal procedures on our local governments. I just got mine from Spain, and I was "late" (but very necessary since I don't live there anymore) and I'm applying literally today for my card in Japan.

There isn't anything like that in the US.

Americans have no national identity card. The closest thing is a Social Security number, which has no security or biometric features.

https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus

And it's a good thing, and personally I would love it if we could stop having even SSNs.

> I would love it if we could stop having even SSNs

Why?

The case that a universal identifier, or even some authoritative list of people, has a benefit that exceeds its cost, has never been made. It’s simply “one of those things”

The problem with SSNs is that places treat it like a secret, when it's an identifier. They were not designed to be a secret, and obviously are a pretty terrible secret at this point in time. What with the fact that probably every person older than 18 has had theirs leaked at some point in time.]

If places would just stop treating them as a secret, it wouldn't even matter.

"The invention of permanent, inherited patronyms was, after the administrative simplification of nature (for example, the forest) and space (for example, land tenure), the last step in establishing the necessary preconditions of modern statecraft. In almost every case it was a state project, designed to allow officials to identity, unambiguously, the majority of its citizens. When successful, it went far to create a legible people. Tax and tithe rolls, property rolls, conscription lists, censuses, and property deeds recognized in law were inconceivable without some means of fixing an individual's identity and linking him or her to a kingroup. Campaigns to assign permanent patronyms have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state's exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing. Fearing, with good reason, that an effort to enumerate and register them could be a prelude to some new tax burden or conscription, local officials and the population at large often resisted such campaigns."

— James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

(Thanks shoo — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29885742)

I guess the general premise is that any national ID number, SSN or otherwise, is liable to be used in all the wrong ways by untrustworthy institutions both inside and outside the government, damaging privacy and opening you up to exciting forms of fraud against your name (/ ID number); it is often treated as a secret, but it is not a secret at all.

— Unfortunately, with enough computers and enough tracking information, bad actors can often do the same thing without a number, anyway, and you can get different kinds of fraud.

Yep. I would oppose any sort of National ID card whether it has biometric security or not. Passport is about the only thing that is a Federal level ID and accepted everywhere as an ID.

I would want states to have their own ID system where an average citizen can vote for policies that make a difference. I am also against cross-state data sharing (Driver's license) and such.

I could accept identifying with a passport, since the costs alone means it would not be supported in most cases, but only if it was associate with a strict requirement that the passport number or any other number/qr/barcode was hidden, and if it was illegal to save copies of even the image of the passport with the numbers hidden.

My state engages in actually illegal data sharing and retention that violates state law. Nobody does anything about.

Who watches the watchers? The people who comprise "the system" rig the system in their favor and cover for each other.

So I'm guessing you're saying: Nothing > ssn , and Nothing > public key cryptography.

Are you also saying: Ssn > public key cryptography? And if so, why?

Yes, yes, no.

See my other comment: people should be in charge of their identity, NOT the government.

Like penis circumcision, SSN is voluntary. Typically parents enroll the child for giggles or whatever.

And no, passport application does not require SSN.

This is completely wrong. The IRS requires children to have an SSN to qualify their families for tax credits, and SSNs are required for most employment. Even if you are a member of a group that does not have to pay into social security, you still need an SSN so that the SSA and IRS can track that you are exempt.

Until the existing system is reformed with something like the GDPR, nobody should support increasing the technical strength of identification.

Currently, the only way you can prevent surveillance companies from unaccountably creating permanent records on you is to avoid feeding them your personal information in the first place. There is absolutely no recourse or even legal concept that prevents "ID.me" from using the data you're basically forced to give them here, for any purpose they later desire. Until there are real data protection laws that allow for the creation of trust through accountability, auditing, and right of deletion, then opposing anything that benefits the surveillance industry is the only way we can protect ourselves.

I'm taking a leap of logic here and guessing you're suggesting a blockchain solution to national identity would have solved this problem?

Many European countries have public key encryption integrated into their national ID card system. No blockchain needed.

Thanks for brightening my day! Honestly- I can use the laughs today.

Yes it would.

Repost of my comment from yesterday: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29982395)

As technically interesting as using a card to sign stuff may be, I don't want that to be the government responsibility, as it then opens the door for it to be used in ways that limit our freedoms: a system that's too perfect can uniquely identify you, in ways that prevent disassociation (ex: the place of birth on the passport is of great interest to some totalitarian places, while only citizenship should matter..) So for me, the ideal ID system is decentralized, self-declarative, and the weight of the proof depends on the length of history, not on "who" says it's true: there should be many such services where you could declare a name and an address and anything else you wish (phone, email...)

The value after a few weeks would be close to nil, so you could decide to "increase it" by having several people vouch for you (strength in numbers) instead of relying on a "who" (public notary).

Or you could totally decide that you care about your freedom/independence/whatever and NOT ask for any vouching. It may be hard, but after a few years of reliably receiving mail and orders at that address, it would acquire some serious weight - a bit like you tend to trust online accounts that have been open for some year.

Among many other things, this would also allow anyone the opportunity to "change" easily: want a new name/move to a new address/etc: create a revocation certificate for the old, sign it with the new, boom you inherit the credential history!

It's just a quick idea, but it shows how IDs could be more like URLs (multiple competing services, and you could have a few at the same time, why not!) by moving away from the current system that's a direct descendant of the census (give the lord a list of people to tax them) and the passport (limit freedom of movement during the war)

At the core, I believe people should be in control of their identity, not governments or states.

> a system that's too perfect can uniquely identify you,

Isn't this a basic requirement of any ID system?

> Isn't this a basic requirement of any ID system?

And now you understand my core opposition to government run ID system.

Think of it like SSH keys: you want them to allow access, and therefore one-way verification. You don't want a bijective system that would allow you to be uniquely identified. So you can have 1 key per system you access.

Most uses of ID are compatible with that usecase: one ID to allow you to pay taxes, one ID to allow you to travel, one ID to prove you have a license to drive, etc.

There's absolutely no need to merge them - except for the convenience of tracking you and adding new usecases easily, without the government shouldering the burden of rolling a new ID AND having people use it.

If there was no cost having an ID that could serve for the sort of purposes you mention, I might agree with you.

But I have no desire to see a society in which zero-cost (or effectively zero-cost) ID systems are the legal requirement for those purposes. As a result, issuing and maintaining the records associated with physical world forms of ID have real costs associated with them, and I would question the benefits to society (even with "privacy" in mind) of replicating that per-potential-ID-category.

[ EDIT : Also, I would think that the way browser fingerprinting works would dissuade you from believing that one-ID-for-X and one-ID-for-Y is going to stop you from being uniquely identified. ]

If you had an ID system that allowed you to get multiple unconnected IDs, what would prevent someone from getting 10 million of them and casting 10 million votes in an election? Or even just having 2 or 3 and claiming stimulus checks or welfare or disability or whatever?

Doesn't the government have to be able to uniquely identify you to even have a chance at providing services equally to everyone?

1. it remains to be seen, 2. should it happen, it would be illegal and expose the perpetrators to jail time

Overall, I'm not so sure the status-quo is worth the tradeoff, especially when accumulated at the population level (10 000 people commiting stimulus check fraud is what, 0.01% of the population?)

While I have long dreamt of public-key cryptography in place of a SSN, I don't think blockchain adds any value on top of that (except filling out a buzzword bingo square).

(Among other issues) I really don't want my identity to become someone else's speculation device and would strongly prefer preventing that if at all possible. Companies selling personal data back and forth as a commodity is already bad enough.

> a system that's too perfect can uniquely identify you, in ways that prevent disassociation (ex: the place of birth on the passport is of great interest to some totalitarian places, while only citizenship should matter..)

Isn't this all information they already have (and would presumably keep)? Ultimately, it's the governing body that's dealing out these keys to access data they already have about you. What data is stored is completely separate from how that data is stored.

If you don't want birthplace on the passport, that's totally separate from SSN vs public keys vs blockchain.

> the ideal ID system is decentralized, self-declarative, and the weight of the proof depends on the length of history, not on "who" says it's true

It would need to also be public, no? Otherwise, it boils back down to "who says it's true".

> moving away from the current system that's a direct descendant of the census (give the lord a list of people to tax them)

If you don't want to be taxed, that's also a separate issue.

> If you don't want birthplace on the passport, that's totally separate from SSN vs public keys vs blockchain.

Not really. If you don't put it there, it can't be collected. A blockchain solution should NOT have provision for fields you don't want out there, like say religion.

> Isn't this all information they already have (and would presumably keep)? Ultimately, it's the governing body that's dealing out these keys to access data they already have about you. What data is stored is completely separate from how that data is stored.

Information gets stale, so what's already out there become less relevant as time goes.

Also, if you don't put everything in a nice convenient form inside a all-in-one document that's ripe for harvesting, you're making the job harder. That's the goal.

> It would need to also be public, no? Otherwise, it boils back down to "who says it's true".

Hence, blockchain

> If you don't want to be taxed, that's also a separate issue.

I tried to explain the origin of the current systems. I'm all for taxes at the point of origin (ex: wage, capital gains) without exposing more information than what's strictly required to do the job.

American Here... I have a major problem with calling the IRS a "social service", taxing authority is not a social service.

I meant the unemployment benefits are a social service.

False. UI is an insurance program paid by the employee.

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.

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.

Some of us might consider this round-about policy implementation a disservice.

And you believe that is a proper, ethical, and correct way to manage social services, to the point were we should call the IRS as social service?

> 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.

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.

> You should let them know to contact their state legislator. [...] This is the equivalent to escalating your issue to a manager.

No, it's the equivalent of escalating it to a member of the Board of Directors.

AKA don't expect any response because "the board" is too high up to deal with a nobody like you or me.

> AKA don't expect any response because "the board" is too high up to deal with a nobody like you or me.

Well, maybe. Legislators are really variable on constitutent service, but many will (or rather, will allow their office staff to; direct, even by something going out under their name rather than a staff contact, is less common) at least gently probe on behalf of constituents on state service issues, and if a high enough volume is involved are more likely to get personally involved.

But any response that does happen is likely to involve butt covering and blame redirection from virtually every step of the management chain, just like when an issue hits the news media, so on issues where you haven't exhausted other avenues short of lawsuits, it's probably not the step to reach for the way escalating to a manager would be. I’ve definitely been involved in issues where premature escalation to a legislator delayed and/or made the resolution less favorable than it probably otherwise would have been because of the degree of attention from management, legal, public and legislative affairs, etc., that the escalation triggered.

It makes sense in the particular circumstances described, though, it's just the analogy that was flawed in a way which might be misleading as to how that generalizes to other situations.

I got no response at all from multiple letters to multiple reps/senators on an issue I had.

They have, the legislator also has a canned response. And the pandemic started Mar 2020, it is now 22 months later.

That is far sufficient time to get a response, even if they were initially overwhelmed.

Families and businesses get overwhelmed too, but they are expected to file NJ tax returns on time. Try not responding to NJ for 14 months after NJ is owed money and see what happens. Rules for thee but not for me is the motto of many governments.

Each person in the US is a constituent of multiple regional legislators, from city council (or local versions) to Representatives and Senators (and President, sure).

I've found luck in starting with emailing the office of my lowest (closest) representative at the smallest unit of government, telling them my problem, and asking them who I can talk to about it. "Who's responsible for pothole repairs on (street that might be state or county controlled instead of the city)?" This puts the ambitions of the office to work. Oftentimes they will rather get credit for solving your problem and do work for you than just give you a phone number or email address, and in the event of a roadblock you can go back to them for more help. "Hey, I tried X but Y happened, got any other ideas?" Your state rep's communications intern doesn't just sit back alphabetizing checks from Walmart executives and police unions.

Ha. I'm my case my representatives completely ignored my letters about rights violations and misconduct by the state police. On other issues, I only receive unhelpful form letters, some of which don't even address the correct issue. Don't expect any real help from your representatives unless it somehow benefits them.

Law enforcement is different.

How so? I should be able to ask my representative's stance on justice reform and get a response. I did not ask them to get involved with a specific case.

OK, now you're talking about asking for a policy position, rather than what they call "constituent services". "Constituent services" is "I am personally having a problem with some aspect of government in my personal life and I am contacting you as my elected representative to help me."

In every place I've lived, elected officials are good at constituent services, and that's how they get re-elected. I'm surprised to hear of elected reps just ignoring constituent services requests.

I also sometimes contact my reps with lobbying/policy stuff -- what is your position on X? I urge you to vote No on Bill Whatever and would like to know if you will. Can you commit to supporting legislation to reform Y? Etc. And it can indeed often take months to get a form letter response that may not really respond to my query at all, or not get a response at all. It's true.

If you want to go on to say that they shouldn't be different, or that the policy issues really do effect you personally so should be considered or treated the same... that's fine, you may be right, but it's not how the offices of elected officials usually operate.

Also, while I'm surprised to hear of reps totally ignoring constituent services requests with no response... if your constituent services request was about police misconduct, and they aren't known as a far-left politician, I'm less surprised, because that's such a hot button "political" issue. (I'm not saying it's "ok" or I like it, just based on my understanding of how politicians operate i'm less surprised).

>I should be able to ask my representative's stance on justice reform and get a response.

It's not on their website?

I believe one had it on there, but it was high-level with basically no details of how they want to implement it. It also didn't cover specific issues I'm concerned about.

For example, magistrates are not required to be lawyers nor pass the bar. I had a magistrate think that I was calling him prejudice when asking to dismiss with prejudice. What a mess. How can they be allowed to be this incompetent? They should need to demonstrate basic legal knowledge and pass the bar. They have a lot of power with very little oversight and training. Nobody is addressing this.

In my case, two state congressional reps ignored me, state senator did not.

He wasn't very helpful, but he at least responded... And not in a canned letter.

Sue for declaratory judgment to have court decide if they broke a rule or law. No money in this, but can lead to their losing job.

You can follow up with injunction from court to order them to cease whatever it is. Then contempt of court if they violate injunction.

I talked to a civil rights lawyer. It would cost at least $5k to get the case going. He also said that while there is basis for a case, the courts generally don't care unless there was substantial monetary damages.

I submitted the information to the DOJ, who are supposed to sue if there's a pattern, policy, or practice that violates one's rights. Frankly, I don't think they'll do anything. Same as the other things I've done - contacting reps (ignored me), filing IAD complaints ("counseled" the trooper but nothing more), filing a bar complaint against the prosecutor (the bar says they won't even investigate prosecutors unless a court declares misconduct and of course that costs money to sue), and a judicial complaint against a magistrate (apparently a recording of the trial does not present sufficient evidence of misconduct even though there was clear bias, he's a retired police chief, refused to even hear a defense motion which is a 4th amendment violation, and yelled at the defense which is an example of misconduct that given when filing out complaint form).

Nobody in the system wants to hold others in the system accountable. The system itself is more important than any individual's rights - that's the justification they give for keeping judicial conduct records secret, even if they contain exculpatory evidence.

If you have the interest you can go after declaratory judgment yourself. Look in your State laws and line up COMPLAINT with every requirement in law. If you don't ask for money, a pro-se can get this started. It's mostly a process. Rights are available to those who individually enforce them.

The attorney's bar club just protects the club members. But malpractice insurance companies know the game and rate the policies based on number of complaints against each attorney. Several complaints significantly increases malpractice insurance cost.

My experience with pro-se representation is that the court doesn't like to side with pro-se individuals. Basically you have to prove everything to twice the standard that the lawyers do to convince the judge.

I might look into it, but I highly doubt anything will happen.

I don't think the complaints matter unless they are pursued. In this case the bar says they won't even investigate it without a court finding misconduct occurred (at that point is there even any investigation needed? Wtf does the bar complaint actually investigate?).

100% this. I had an issue with the NJ DMV, and the senator's office was able to get my issue resolved like same-day and told the DMV to eat glass. I even got a formal apology letter from the DMV.

Not all congresscritters will have the same effectiveness, but that is the first place to start if the trail to getting results turns to a dead-end.

The correct term would be a government ombudsman. And legislators totally fulfill that job for a significant part of their day.

Due to COVID, my representatives no longer take visitors, and no longer take phone calls to their office, nor do they provide a contact e-mail. They have a form you can fill out on their websites.

That way you get a response (thank you for completing the form) and then zero way to track the communication. In my case, I have never received anything after that from any of my representatives.

You can't call to check on it, because, again, they're no longer taking phone calls. And even if they did, you have no reference number.

They took advantage of the pandemic to just completely cut ties with their constituents outside of THEIR approved avenues.

Super cool. Very representative.

It sounds like their opponents should easily be able to trounce them in an election. If you don't like your current reps, you may want to tip the other campaign (or internal challengers in the primaries) on this.

If you otherwise like your current reps, I'm sorry.

You assume it's a place where there are competitive elections which compete on satisfying the voters. In many places, it's not the case - it's either uni-party location where whoever the party appoints wins, or a location where the competition is between different groups of special-interest players that couldn't care less about the voters that do not align with them. If you find yourself in that environment - nobody is trouncing anything, however incompetent the actual management of affairs becomes. People stay in their positions until they either die or decide to move on by their own volition.

Without representation, we simply shouldn’t pay taxes.

Right?

> 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.

Not emailing back is a classic plausible deniability strategy. No one is asking for a response right now. Or even later today. Or even a week or even a month from now.

But if the NJ government’s budget does not allow them to respond to a single email after multiple months, that is a sign of intentional negligence, or a failed state.

... or a massively underfunded government, which is precisely what the policies of one of our two major political parties for the last 40 years (at least) have sought to create (they are quite open about this). But hey, maybe that fits under the "intentional negligence" category...

That would make sense on a federal level. But not in NJ which is solid Democrat, and definitely not with their among the highest in the nation taxes.

Again, I am giving quite a bit of leeway. At 14 months with no response, that is not understaffing. That is deliberate sabotage by leaders to prevent people from getting benefits.

You understand that even NJ taxes are low by comparsion with most western European nations, yes? And that even in those nations, people still find publically-facing government agencies frustrating to deal with?

Still, I'm inclined to agree with you that some of what you describe in your 2nd para is likely happening too.

>And that even in those nations, people still find publically-facing government agencies frustrating to deal with?

That seems to contradict your assertion that the government would have given him better service had more taxes been directed at them.

Having worked in this space my cynical observation is that you don't get the budget to run a big appeals process and a quality watchdog team, etc, etc, if you don't suck bad enough to need those things in the first place.

Or a lack of effective metrics tracking and performance management. Maybe those metrics would show the offices were operating at tip-top efficiency and were deserving of additional budget to better serve their constituents. Or maybe it would show something else entirely, but either way the data would be useful.

If you call NJ unemployment offices anytime after 8:05AM, you get a message saying to call back the next day. 22 months after the pandemic started.

All the leaders know what is happening. It has been in the news many times.

Ok. Is that enough evidence to conclude that “they need more budget and then things would be fixed”?

No, my initial comment was the system was designed to in such a way as to inconvenience people and hope they get tired of trying to collect the money.

That is the problem it is so difficult to determine whether the negligence is intentional or not.

I've found it ridiculously easy to add web beacons to emails to political critters.

Collectively the American people support efforts like what you describe. Their voices do not affect policy, though. Only those of billionaires and corporate lobbyists do.

No.

The problem is that systems are deliberately designed to be difficult to navigate in order to discourage use.

It isn't money. It is a belief that recipients are not deserving, and so should be made to "pay" for it or denied altogether.

Well, sure, that's also a factor when it comes to specific government functions such as an unemployment benefit division. But it's overlaid on top of the general lack of adequate staffing, which in turn reflects taxation policy.

That's not even broadly true.

I worked for a state agency that make workforce services software for several states. Not unemployment, but the other programs to help people find jobs and/or get retrained.

The management overwhelmingly wanted to find ways to help people and spend the money (that's how they get bigger grants, after all, by spending all of the last one and "coming up short"). The majority of the staff wanted to help people and spend the state's money as well.

But the rules are arcane and the agencies are perpetually understaffed and the software systems are terrible (federal programs often allow too small of a fraction of the allocated money to be spent on administration). So it's still a hell of a thing to get the money spent helping people, even if everybody's heart is in the right place.

The problems are myriad, but I'd say the biggest issue is state legislators that are unwilling to invest in modernization in "good times" when the benefits programs aren't over-taxed, and then wonder why the systems (both technical and people) can't scale when society needs the help.

> But the rules are arcane and the agencies are perpetually understaffed and the software systems are terrible

This is not accidental.

> But the rules are arcane and the agencies are perpetually understaffed

Exactly, and this is by design. Here is how it was designed to not work in Florida:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/florida-unemployment...

But the general outline is the same most everywhere.

> management overwhelmingly wanted to find ways to help

They don't matter, they don't set the rules or the budget.

>"pay enough taxes to staff government agencies at sufficient levels"

Our government already runs at a tremendous deficit. They can keep borrowing longer than we can remain on the run from the law.

Edit: I had actually completely misread the GP's comment. I had somehow thought they meant that we should do a tax-strike in order to force the government to reform. My cynical counterargument was that they would just borrow to make up for the missed revenue until the protestors gave-in or were arrested.

> Our government already runs at a tremendous deficit.

Because we pay less in taxes than we (as the people who elect our governments) choose to spend. Sure, we could spend less, but we could also tax more (a LOT more), and have done so in the past.

I completely misread your comment. I had somehow thought you meant that we should do a tax-strike in order to force the government to reform. My cynical counterargument was that they would just borrow to make up for the missed revenue until the protestors gave-in or were arrested.

US tax revenue is broadly about 25% of GDP, significantly lower than the 33% that's average in the OECD

It reached it's lowest since 1965, 22.9%, in 2009. Highest recently was 2017 (27%), and in 2000 it reached 28.3%

The Clinton years were probably what you're looking for, where tax revenues increased linearly from 25.6% to 28.3%, but through the 70s and 80s it varied from 24 to 26%, same as now.

Not sure if an extra 1% of GDP would fall in your "LOT more" category, but it seems far less than normal countries raise.

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.

That sucks, I'm sorry to hear about that. For future reference, the best way to get a politician's attention is to get on FOX News and talk shit about their pet program. It's like how people post on HN when they can't get support from FAANG.

I mean I threw the stack down in the my one assemblyman's office and spoke about it for over an hour to him in person, he was my neighbor in the same building I worked in. But being that he's of the party that's not in power in the state, there's very little he can do.

I also requested that he co-sponsor one of the bills that greatly increases penalties for defrauding the system (it's currently pretty much a slap on the wrist).

The vast majority of Americans are entirely unaware that most of the day-to-day laws and systems are implemented at state level (aside from griping about governor's office executive orders). There's one news network that reports on our state's government affairs and hardly anyone watches it. But everyone knows the second a federal politician does something.

I remember being incredulous on finding out that a NJ company was forced to pay unemployment benefits, to a staff fired for stealing gift cards.

The staff was caught on video using the cards to buy goods.

If there is a state with a more dysfunctional Unemployment benefits office, I'd like to hear stories

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.

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.

having experienced some Kafka-esque systems myself, I understand the rant.

My presumably unreasonable imaginary proposal for these sorts of problems is that we would build off of real-life social networks. I think my mail carrier, for instance, would be able to verify that I am the same person who has lived at my address for the past N years.

Which really boils down to one human being seeing another human being's face. It's pretty low-tech.

That said, I feel like using video chats to do this is arguably a reasonable next-best alternative to IRL verification for people who for one reason or another can't ever meet their mail carrier.

I guess what I'm getting at is - it _seems_ like there could be a good version of this system that is roughly the right solution in a mostly unobjectionable, non-surveillance-state way. I don't really know what boxes it would have to check to move from the bad category into the good category. But I'd love to hear more from you or others on what options we might have.

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.

https://www-rtlnieuws-nl.translate.goog/economie/column/4140...

If someone 'steals my identity' and gets my tax return money before I do, it could be quite a lot of work for me to prove to the IRS that it was stolen and that I should get the money. Which shifts the burden of dealing with identity theft onto legitimate claimants.

I wouldn't be surprised if this same thing could happen with social services, but I don't have much experience with the system.

In other words, I'm not sure if the overall problem we're trying to solve is simply "avoid waste" - it might be more like "prevent the average person from having their identity stolen and their time/money wasted". Which seems like a problem worth trying to solve even if the incidence is relatively low?

Keeping the average business owner from being harassed by fake/false/dubious unemployment claims would also be good.

In California alone, at least 20 Billion dollars (over 10%) in pandemic relief funds were fraudulently given away. Quite a bit of it went to felons in jail! This is surely an underestimate. The Netherlands are not comparable to the US. Americans don't trust our institutions because by and large, they aren't trust worthy.

In absolute terms, 120-150 million Euros is still a vast sum of money. It's still worth trying to crack down on.

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]

[1] - https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/california-employment-d...

[2] - https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-17/californ...

Californian here.

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.

Build (some) and maintain (most) roads?

That's ~5% of the state budget, and primarily financed by the gas tax, not the income tax. (Large projects funded with bonds)

Source: https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/research-innov...

There is no purpose to delineating government revenues since money is fungible.

Even though legislators might label or apportion some source of tax to some specific expense, in reality, they can always move it elsewhere (since they are the legislators). Therefore, it is always a question of which expense has political priority.

I thought the problem with CA was that the state budget isn't fungible - 90%+ of the money is allocated via ballot measures or the state constitution and can't be touched by the legislature.

I do not know enough about CA budget's mechanics, but that would seem like a very inefficient and ineffective way to operate a state.

https://www.budgetchallenge.org/pages/home gets you an idea of the challenge that they have.

... but then you realize that Florida with zero state tax also somehow manages to build and maintain the roads.

Florida has a statewide sales tax. I assume you mean that Florida has no income tax.

https://www.fdot.gov/docs/default-source/comptroller/pdf/GAO...

Flrodia's roads are mostly funded from taxes on fuel and motor vehicle fees.

Flordia has the 11th highest tax on gas in the nation - https://taxfoundation.org/state-gas-tax-rates-2021/

From https://taxfoundation.org/state-infrastructure-spending/ State breakdown is 50% from gas taxes, 20% from licensing fees, and 30% from toll roads.

Back to the first pdf - 52% of the total funding for the road is from the state, 26% is from federal and the other sources are use turnpike (15%), local (3%), and bonds (4%).

I'd rather tax users than have a slush fund that has no accountability because state lawmakers can allocate more money to it whenever they want without regard for the results achieved for the money invested so far. Then if you want more money you have to go to the voters and convince them more taxes on gas are a good idea.

Somehow Florida still manages to have, as of writing, $1.50 cheaper gas per gallon than California, so I think they're doing fine with their taxation scheme.

There's a bit of market forces at play there that shouldn't be ignored. Florida is much closer to the refineries and oilfields in the south east than California is and also doesn't have any smog constraints which also means more expensive gas. Then you get into the "some cities in California have other constraints which gets to micro lots of gas and that ruins economies of scale".

From a state level tax perspective, Florida is $0.4226/g and California is $0.6698/g.

California has purposefully pushed out manufacturing and energy production. Scored a self-goal there.

Edit: can't reply to gas formulation copy/paste below, so ... CA has highest population by far and should be #1 in energy. worldpopulationreview.com

Energy is leaving to eastern States where energy can be turned into electricity and delivered to CA via power lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_refining_in_Washingt...

> California has the third greatest refining capacity in the U.S. at 1,892,471 barrels per day.

> The California Reformulated Gasoline Program requires the entire state to use gasoline with minimal oxygen content that burns cleaner than conventional fuel. A number of other states are either required or opt to use reformulated gasoline in an effort to reduce smog-forming and toxic pollutants. 30 percent of U.S. gasoline is reformulated, however California’s Reformulated Gasoline Program uses a proprietary blend that differs from the federal reformulated standard. While PADD I features ample production capacity for federal reformulated gasoline, the only refineries outside of California capable of producing the blend required by state law are located in Washington and the Gulf Coast. The Gulf Coast refineries haven’t produced reformulated gasoline since 2011 leaving Washington as California’s only out-of-state gasoline source.

---

This isn't an issue of pushing out manufacturing and energy production. It's that there is a very limited set of refineries that make it and those refineries aren't near the oil fields of the gulf states.

The geography of the area (mountains) make it more challenging and less economical to get a pipeline from somewhere else (Canada?) to the refineries in California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_oil_and_gas_industr... also has material on the subject.

The relevant reformulation info is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Oxygenate_blending

> Oxygenate blending adds oxygen-bearing compounds such as MTBE, ETBE, TAME, TAEE, ethanol, and biobutanol. The presence of these oxygenates reduces the amount of carbon monoxide and unburned fuel in the exhaust. In many areas throughout the U.S., oxygenate blending is mandated by EPA regulations to reduce smog and other airborne pollutants. For example, in Southern California fuel must contain 2% oxygen by weight, resulting in a mixture of 5.6% ethanol in gasoline. The resulting fuel is often known as reformulated gasoline (RFG) or oxygenated gasoline, or in the case of California, California reformulated gasoline. The federal requirement that RFG contain oxygen was dropped on 6 May 2006 because the industry had developed VOC-controlled RFG that did not need additional oxygen.

Is accountability your main concern or do you just not want services like unemployment or welfare to exist in the first place?

The original comment was discussing sources of road funding, which is completely unrelated to unemployment or welfare (neither of which I mentioned).

they have no personal state income tax. there is still a corporate income tax, and they still get all their revenue from taxes. most if it is from much more regressive kinds of taxation like sales tax.

New Hampshire also has no income tax or sales tax, and has infinitely better roads than nearby states like Massachusetts.

Roads are not particularly hard or costly to build. If they are a priority, they can be built and maintained without taxing a population to death. If you think its reasonable to lose a third or more of your income to pay for roads, you are a tremendous sucker.

and the aqueducts, sanitation, education, and the wine…

Why are people honestly against ID requirements for voting?

Pretty much every democracy in the world has this. Europeans need to show ID to vote.

Because there is no mandated form of ID in the USA (and it was fought against for decades by conservatives claiming it represented unwarranted overreach by the state).

As a result, actually obtaining some form of ID that might be acceptable (the forms vary mostly depending on the political party that writes the rules) can present a significant challenge to some voters, and for some of us, that is an anathema (the right to vote being sacred, certainly compared with the right to drive for example).

Introduced a national ID that the government is OBLIGATED TO PROVIDE for every person, and many of the arguments against it would go away. Currently, no state in the US, nor the federal government, has such a form of ID.

Voting is a state concern. It doesn't matter that there is no Federal standard. Every state that has Voter ID will have some form of acceptable ID card that you can get, even if you don't drive.

I said "government" and mentioned both state and federal. The point is that there is no ID required in any state. Voter ID cards are not the obligation of the government to provide - voters much take the steps to procure them. The right to vote precedes and predates such a requirement - if the state wants to impose it, that's fine but it should come with the obligation upon the state government to provide the ID, not a requirement to procure it.

And getting that will cost money, often requires traveling non-trivial distances (note the demographics of the areas where state offices are opened or closed, and viability of public transit), and requires proof of residency / identity which can be hard for some people to satisfy (there are plenty of people who’ve hit issues about things like maiden names, being able to prove continuous proof of residence when they e.g. weren’t on a lease or other legal document, etc.).

I still think ID is good but it really needs to be paired with a robust improvement in making the system of getting ID work better. If we’re requiring it, the government should be required to provide it for free and meet a legal standard of proof for denial.

Elections are local not national, so why would you need a national ID? You can use a State ID for a local election, and each election can have their own requirements about it, matching whatever the local ID in use there is.

There is no mandated form of ID in any state. How can you require people to have something to vote that is not required for any other purpose, at least if the government is not required to provide it?

Isn't that effectively the same argument though? In practice states provide ID's to everyone who can prove residency. Forcing states to grant ID's to everyone who asks for it is the same as forcing them to allow anyone to vote without ID's, just with an extra step.

You don't "force states to grant IDs to everyone who asks for it". You force states to issue IDs to all legal voters. States do not "provide IDs" to anyone - you are required to fill out paperwork, potentially travel and more.

In nations that do in fact have a national ID, everyone gets one, with little or no effort (certainly no need to travel), and if you wanted to mark the card "non-voting" that wouldn't be a big step.

Your right to vote is established by the US Constitution. A state can't burden that right. If a state wants to add an ID requirement, that's fine, but getting the ID must present no burden to any voter.

In reality, the conundrum here is entirely of conservatives' own making. On the one hand, they (non-exclusively) are adamantly against automatically issued national or even state IDs. On the other, they want to require ID for voting (ascribe whatever reason to this you want). You can't fulfill both these desires without violating the constitutional right to vote.

The standard is no undue burden. That does not cover minor hassles like paperwork. Unless you're claiming it's some kind of language issue.

If you live without a vehicle in a rural corner of your state, compelling you to travel to somewhere else in order to get a state-sanctioned ID is, IMO, an undue burden.

If you are required to have documents and paperwork for a voter ID that you are not otherwise required to have, that is, IMO, an undue burden.

I have no problem with the state saying "you must have this document in order to vote" (it even makes a limited amount of sense, despite being a solution in search of a problem). I do have a problem with the state doing anything other than ensuring that every resident who should that document gets it with minimal effort (preferably zero).

> Why are people honestly against ID requirements for voting?

I think a better question is why folks are against ID requirements but are for vaccine passports and photo ids to buy cigarettes, booze, get into rated R movies, drive, or fly.

really? you can't imagine how buying booze is any different from voting?

I can't tell if you are suggesting that the standards for alcohol be higher than for voting or not? Because currently they are.

they're not higher. the federal government doesn't even care how old you are, let alone where you live or whether you are who you say you are. those standards are all locally mandated and locally enforced.

Sort of... The federal government passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act[1], showing they did care. Although they don't directly enforce drinking age mins, the carrot and the stick approach was used.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...

i'm aware of this and you're talking past the point i made. federal restrictions are stricter on voting than they are on alcohol.

They require proof to buy alcohol. They do not to vote. the consequences are not the only part of "requirements".

who does? the federal government does not.

I think this is a frame of reference issue. The I buy beer at whole foods, someone checks my ID and won't sell it to me if I don't have one. If I vote via mail in ballot, I sign my name on a sheet of paper that arrives to an unsecured mailbox. Whatever the law that applies, as an end user, beer seems to be a more restricted product.

I'd wager voting (federal elections) kill way more people than Americans who die downstream of booze. Its just a question of locality, really.

I mean, I'm opposed to ID's to buy some of those things too. But thats my libertarianism speaking. Generally we have no strict ID requirements for those items, its up to the seller to verify age, which that can do by obvious appearance, or by carding the person. It's why you dont get carded all the time.

Driving requires a specific credential and is not relevant for this discussion.

Flying is another case, you do not need an ID to fly, there are provisions to fly without photo ID if you do not have one, they're just more time consuming and meant to be somewhat punitive.

My point is that it's incongruent. The reasons brought forth supporting an id-free voting system are absent when any policy that requires more government papers and over sight are put in place.

Generally, if you saw conservatives proposing policies that made ID available to everyone for no cost (like a free copy of their birth certificate and free passport card for every citizen), their opposition would look silly on this.

Instead, conservatives focus on the ID mandate, ahead of fixing the inherent supply issues. Indeed, while I still have objections after this issue is fixed, they're largely irrelevant to the political mainstream.

Generally I'm opposed to anything that smacks of 'papers place', and the government has a higher bar to need to confirm and record identity than John Q. Public (also I'd note, the examples you cited, generally do not record anything, they just verify age of purchaser).

It all boils down to some form of absurd partisanship.

> Generally, if you saw conservatives proposing policies that made ID available to everyone for no cost (like a free copy of their birth certificate and free passport card for every citizen), their opposition would look silly on this.

Or imagine if you saw Democrats proposing this?

Any group raising their money from small dollar donations has an incentive to do nothing. As soon as they accomplish something, their funding dries up.

Both are raising their money from large dollar donations. They also both accomplish plenty - bipartisan votes pass things in wealthy donors' interests.

The things that they do nothing on are "wedge" issues. The filibuster guarantees that those are the only things that can't get passed if Congress stays vaguely equally divided. Passing material improvements to average lives is no benefit to either side.

Everything you just described is a privilege, not a civic duty.

Literally everything is a partisan issue including the voting ID. The general argument against it is that proposed valid IDs are not free to obtain, and this would equate to a voting tax which is forbidden in the constitution.

Definitely a partisan issue, but if we look through the fog - why not find the root cause of this argument and make IDs free? It can be done by the states. We can send COVID tests to every American. I am sure issueing IDs (in control of States) would be possible.

This way, you can strike down the arguments about the entire Democracy hinging on fake voting and "lost the election" BS. Give Republicans what they want. I don't see any issue with it.

Also Democrats need to calm down and realize that it is not that unreasonable to ask people for IDs to avoid duplicate voting. It is not anti-democratic and definitely not doing anything helpful by calling people that want IDs fascists. Election integrity should be so good that it shouldn't have gaping holes like not having a fricking ID.

Rational arguments get lost in the partisan noise. For what its worth, the federal government could make passports (or passport cards) free for every citizen, which would solve the ID requirement. It's something that can be done by presidential fiat even, no laws required, that doesnt solve the issue that the underlying document needed to get any ID cost money, but its a start.

They are either completely or almost completely free to get in states already. The usual argument then swaps to how much of a pain in the ass it is to source ID documents and show up in person at the DMV or similar.

http://sharedprosperityphila.org/documents/Revised-ID-Waiver...

While this is from 2015, this does not appear to be true.

Those who do have a free ID, require a time consuming waiver process.

Free needs to mean free, "not fill out this stack of paperwork and we'll send it off to the state capitol and see if it'll get approved"

Means testing is expensive and time consuming.

I moved to a new state last year and to get an ID/DL the first available appointment was 90 days away. The amount of documentation required for the said ID was also less than whats needed for a US passport. Even after an appointment for a specific time, I waited 1.5 hours in the line for my turn. The fee was nominal (for me, $25.) But I can totally see how it can be hard for some people to go through the whole process.

I don't know that the US is especially worse than other countries when it comes to time and paperwork needed to receive govt services. I have waited in long lines all over the world.

This isn't for government services, this is for voting. The kind of people that are prime targets for disenfranchisement are exactly the same people who can least afford to spend a long time in line to vote. And they won't, because the relative value of that vote to them is pretty low, but in aggregate pretty high to the folks who'd like to disenfranchise them to win elections.

I don't believe that they are free in most states. $25 is a lot for some people. Three hours to take the bus to the DMV, wait in line, and take the bus home is both a reality and time they don't have for some people.

Until the voter ID proposals address these issues, they aren't "securing our elections", they are putting arbitrary barriers in place of American's inalienable right to vote. Many of us will never support disenfranchising anyone.

Voting fraud and election fraud are distinctly different things; the former gets all the attention despite the latter being the real concern: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/B...

One of the 2 parties is more incentivized to discourage voting, and that's worthy of discussion.

I am strongly anti-partisan but am compelled to vote in alignment with what I consider to be the least-worst option.

It's beyond frustrating to try to discuss these issues without it becoming a tribal war, even here on HN where one would hope for a higher level of discourse.

33 States offer ID card fee waivers. There are 10 States that don't offer waivers but also require photo ID to vote.

Make the ids free? I've been out of Mexico for >10yrs but when I became 18 I easily got my voting id in Mexico, free of charge.

> Make the ids free?

That would be the 'logical' solution, but the party that wants voter ID is not trying to do something logical.

It wants to prevent people who don't currently have it from voting. So they demand ID, without making it possible/easier to get. (And when they do make it possible/easier to get, its only in their political strongholds - or they explicitly disqualify particular kinds of state-issued ID from being used to vote.)

Selective disenfranchisement is the whole point of the policy, not an unfortunate, unforeseen, unpredictable side effect. If you'd like to learn more about the history of this, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow are a good primer on the motivations behind it. Those motivations haven't gone anywhere, because the cultural struggle in question has never actually been resolved.

> but the party that wants voter ID is not trying to do something logical.

If the opposing party wanted to be logical, they would just make IDs free and easy. Especially while they are running the government.

1. They don't really get to run the government in the states where this is an issue.

2. Once in a blue moon, they do. But anything they build to enable this requires constant funding and maintenance. Their opponents either dismantle it when they take power, or retroactively disqualify existing IDs from being eligible for voting.

It's not, and has never been about IDs. It's about disenfranchisement.

I agree that the current Republican approach is about disenfranchisement.

However, voter ID itself is a completely reasonable thing. This issue will never go away. The most logical thing for Democrats to do is to enact voter ID the right way so as to remove this as a tool from the Republicans' arsenal.

"Republicans may implement voter ID improperly, so we must never ever verify that the people casting votes are doing so legally" is an insane position, honestly.

An obvious first step would be to make getting a passport easier and free, though I am not sure if the federal government can compel states to accept a passport as identification.

> "Republicans may implement voter ID improperly, so we must never ever verify that the people casting votes are doing so legally" is an insane position, honestly.

We already verify this, we just don't do it with the particular methods that they demand (and why they reject state-issued IDs that aren't used by their preferred demographics.)

Which is, of course, a game of goal-post shifting, that is impossible to win.

Note that voter ID laws are being passed at the _state_ level. Doing what you say above is fine, but getting states to recognize those IDs is not. This is not some trivial problem in America (like it may be in other countries).

> they demand ID, without making it possible/easier to get

Wouldn't this be the responsibility of the government in power, and not require any participation from the opposition?

A nationally required ID is constitutionally questionable, meaning this would need handled at the State level. It would require involvement from all parties.

The Federal government should set standards for features that need to be present on a State/Territory ID card "in order to facilitate interstate commerce". Then offer to subsidize production/distribution programs run by the States, for any State with a compliant ID program. Even better if we fused all of this with FICAM somehow. (https://www.idmanagement.gov/ )

The DoD has had ID card production figured out for years. All it takes is a work station (for checking your entry in a database and confirming the data that goes onto the card), a specialized printer, and a few other peripherals (camera, fingerprint scanner, keypad). I can walk into a DoD ID card center and walk out with a new card in 15 minutes. You could easily stuff several of these workstations into the back of a van, and then drive around to neighborhoods, bringing ID services to the disadvantaged. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card

> So they demand ID, without making it possible/easier to get.

Great, have congress legislate laws to make it easier/free to obtain passports. Instead of requiring folks to travel to DMV/Post office/etc., why not have federal public servants visit them door-to-door and assist in issuing it? We do it for census, so what's preventing them from doing it for passports?

Charitably, the democrats don't care to take any action because there's never been evidence that voter fraud is an actual issue. It happens, in minuscule amounts, in most elections and is statistically meaningless. Most cases of voting fraud in the US are mistakes, because sometimes people don't realize when they've lost the right to vote, or didn't know they were taken off the voter rolls due to inactivity, or being incorrectly listed as dead or similar.

How much are we willing to spend on non-issues?

This is not my opinion however, as I think the US could do with a guaranteed, everyone has it, national ID card. Republicans however definitely don't want that, as it could be evidence that a government can actually do something right, and that's anathema to them, and also because a not-small group of evangelicals think that a government issued ID is a sign of the devil or something.

yep, that would solve this problem entirely

> Make the ids free?

Voter ID laws are all over the place. Very wide deviations from one state to the next, and every state has different ideas about what counts as an acceptable form of identification (they don't always have to be government issued photo identification cards). Of the states that require ID for voting, the following also provide a method to get a free ID to use for voting (although it's possible I missed one or two):

Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.

https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state

Because we make getting an ID cost money, and make it difficult for poor people.

If you live in a rural place, or are poor, getting an ID is hard, it costs money to get the underlying proof of identity, then costs time (which is money) to get the ID itself, because you often must travel vast distances to the office that issues photo ID's.

If we solved the issuance problem, so everyone could get a free copy birth certificate and made passports free (which can be obtained via an appointment at most post offices), then this problem would be easily solved, and my objections to voter ID would pretty much instantly fall away.

That said, as a former polling place worker, the amount of voter fraud is.. vastly overstated, its a basically non-existent problem, and is mostly an issue of people making good faith mistakes.

However, if it makes folks feel better, its a societal good to get everyone some form of free and easy photo ID, so for me its a two birds with one stone policy, I'll give on this issue, to get the other one solved.

The issue is conservatives seem hell bent on passing voter ID laws without doing enough (or sometimes anything) to solve the (ID) supply side of the equation.

Make IDs free. These are all weasle arguments for not attempting to improve and gives ammunition to Republicans to question election integrity (even though it didn't stand up in the courts).

I'm 100% with you man, I think its a net social good to give everyone a free ID, while I think voter ID not needed as a policy, once everyone has an ID it causes little if any harm.

I'm generally opposed to anything that smacks of 'papers please', thats my personal root of opposition, but its very weak, and if someone promised a policy that gave everyone a free passport but mandated voter ID requirements, I would gladly show up and vote for them.

Make IDs free _and_ do not tie them to an address. The address requirement needlessly disenfranchises some 500k people from a litany of opportunities.

Passports do not require an address.

But they do require some other form of ID.

This is changeable, however, passport could be a form of primary ID.

How do you know where the person can vote (district) if no address?

If that were true surely Republican's would be proposing making IDs free themselves no? If the purpose is to protect the integrity of our elections and not to disenfranchise voters, surely that would be step 1 right?

I'm not aware of any such proposals, are you?

32 states already require IDs for voting.

That number is a bit misleading. For example Idaho is counted in that 32, and here we are required to show ID OR sign an affidavit. Also are those IDs free? Otherwise I'm not sure what that changes about my point.

In many cases the ID is free, and available to anybody who can spend multiple hours during the workday standing in a line in the county seat an hour away from home.

This is how it is used to disenfranchise people. Add a small clause to the rule that says "every county has 1 location" and it is zero burden for rural voters while urban voters are locked out of the process because no single government office can handle 10 million people. Then the legislators will blame the people in the urban counties for being "lazy" and not voting. We saw in 2020 that the voting rate discrepancies are almost entirely the effect of longstanding voter restrictions that just happened to not work that year, which is why so many state governments have worked overtime to double down on voting restrictions to avoid making the same mistake of allowing people to vote.

This reminds me of how my stances on almost anything are circumstantial to the government they apply to.

I remember when Mitt Romney got blasted for being against Federal involvement in healthcare while having signed state level legislation for the same thing when he was Governor of Massachusetts. I saw that it was seen as controversial politician hypocrisy but I noticed that it matches my ability to compartmentalize topics. (note: I don't have an opinion on the actual issue of that event and don't care, only noticed I could just as easily look at the circumstances for one jurisdiction and like an outcome, while being against the same outcome in another jurisdiction)

That ability was tested when one time I was stopped by border police on a train into Germany or Austria. They just did a check scan of my passport. Some residents on the train thought it was embarrassing for their country that it could be "so unwelcoming" to foreigners, but myself and some other foreigners from different places were pretty enamored.

This doesn't translate to my stance on US checks based on appearance, or ID requirements in the US or political affiliation or anything.

Only reason I write it is because I wonder if there are other people like me, because I can't tell.

There are a great many things that I’m in favor of local or state governments having the power/standing to do and opposed to the federal government having the same power/involvement. It’s the entire reason for the Tenth Amendment, which for my taste should be interpreted much more strictly rather than treating it with the same level of function as your appendix.

In my case, because the USA does not have a national ID, and this disenfranchises anyone who is unwilling to pay to get said state ID, or does not have the means to get to an office.

I have yet to meet anyone advocating for ID to vote who actually wants to address these by both making said ID free for all Americans and paying for the programs necessary to ensure that every American has easy access to get one. This means everything from busing programs to opening new offices in areas that don't have one to putting people on the street to collect the necessary forms and make sure the homeless get them. Then also making sure you find a way to ensure that the disabled, elderly, or just people who can't kill two hours standing in line have an easy way to vote.

Most instead seem to treat that disenfranchisement as acceptable even desired. Truly address the issue of not everyone having an ID and universal access to easy voting (I'm not aware of any lawmakers proposing Voter ID laws attempting to do so) and my objections go away.

Then you'll only have to deal with the folks who are against requiring everyone have ID because they worry about turning us into a "Papers Please" kind of society.

> In my case, because the USA does not have a national ID,

Solution: Make the USA passport card free and compulsory.

You can make it free, but you can't make it compulsory. While the constitution allows for a national ID scheme in the sense of making a card and issuing it, actually using it for anything would be near impossible.

https://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1214&con...

There is the Bank ID formula to work around that, at least for the nation state checks: "The Identity Card belongs to the Union, and each Citizen of the Union is obligated to use it as specified in this section of the Code, as enforced by the President of the Union."

> Solution: Make the USA passport card free and compulsory.

Great! All that's left is addressing all the challenges I brought up around making obtaining one simple for everyone (no, drive 40 minutes to your nearest post-office doesn't count), and making voting universally easily accessible to everyone and you have my support!

Given that as far as I know not a single lawmaker who has been pushing Voter ID has backed your suggestion, much less put any effort into addressing my other concerns, I don't think I'll be supporting Voter ID anytime soon.

> Solution: Make the USA passport card free and compulsory.

That would be the ultimate solution, and, as it was mentioned, something that has been proven effective in a very large chunk of the developed world.

But having spent the last five years in the US, I think this will trigger the opposition of most conservative pundits, politicians, and attorneys across the country. Ironically, these are the same people who advocate for stringent voter ID laws.

The integrity of our vote is much greater than any of the issues you brought up. Every issue you have against a national ID can be solved easily.

As many have mentioned the USPS could serve as the backbone with ID cards being printed in kiosks on the spot. The USPS already provides the means for obtaining your passport.

It's not clear to me why anyone falls for the rhetoric of ID's suppressing or disenfranchising voters, it's a lot of partisan nonsense. "Someone think of the homeless and disabled elderly, how will they vote" when we all know the reality is they don't.

> The integrity of our vote is much greater than any of the issues you brought up.

The integrity of our vote includes ensuring every eligible voter is able to do so without obstacles. As far as I can tell this is currently the primary threat to the integrity of the vote we are facing.

> Every issue you have against a national ID can be solved easily.

Great let's solve it then! As mentioned actually solve those issues instead of hand waving them away and I'll be pro-voter ID. But as far as I can tell no one is trying to solve them, especially not the people currently pushing voter ID.

> As many have mentioned the USPS could serve as the backbone

Not everyone has a USPS nearby. Not everyone has a car to drive there. I don't accept denying these people the vote.

> "Someone think of the homeless and disabled elderly, how will they vote" when we all know the reality is they don't.

Your reality is news to me, and I don't accept that it's okay to make it hard for anyone to vote just because you don't think they want to.

> who is unwilling to pay to get said state ID

Voting ID's are free in all states they are required.

> or does not have the means to get to an office.

This could be said for anything...it is funny that the liberal American solution to lack of access to ID offices is to get rid of ID's...not, you know, improve access to said offices (subsidized Ubers that link into an ID appointment, maybe only available every year/whenever you need to renew).

> it is funny that the liberal American solution to lack of access to ID offices is to get rid of ID's...not, you know, improve access to said offices

It's funny that the conservative American solution to lack of access to ID offices is just deny them a vote... not, you know, improve access to said offices.

Seriously, what do you think the conservative reaction to giving a tech darling like Uber taxpayer money to cart the poor around? I can hardly imagine the backlash.

Also why assume I'm a liberal? Not requiring an ID has long big a conservative principal. It's only recently that requiring one has become a republican one. Turns out the world isn't as simple as conservatives vs liberals.

There has been some motion on the democratic side towards support for Voter ID that is free, universal, and easy to get:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/21/democrats...

Awesome! I suspect if we had started by making a point to make sure everyone has IDs instead of starting with "let's require IDs knowing full well that some people don't have them" this would've been a minor issue and we could be done already.

Yeah, the challenge there is that there are loud partisans on both sides of the aisle against national-id based on freedom from government/mark-of-the-beast concerns.

>I have yet to meet anyone advocating for ID to vote who actually wants to address these by both making said ID free for all Americans

I've seen the opposite, not a single person who wants voter ID is against making it freely available to those who can't afford it. In fact, voter ID is already required in a number of states, and not only are there free options available in those states (because it would be a poll tax otherwise), but voter ID's in those states have not shown to decrease minority turnout in elections.

It's a completely fake issue.

> I've seen the opposite, not a single person who wants voter ID is against making it freely available

I have. I've met plenty of people who say if you aren't willing to spend $25 on your ID you don't deserve to vote. But that's really besides the point given that it only addresses one cherry picked issue out of a number I brought up. Doesn't matter if the ID is free if you have to spend 3 hours bussing to and from, waiting in line, and bussing back from getting it. Or if there is no public transit available. Doesn't matter if the ID is free if there is an hour long line because there aren't enough polling places in your area and we've banned mail-in and drop off ballots. Or if you are simply too infirm to make it to said polling place. Or aren't willing to wait in a large crowd of a hundred of your closest strangers I'm the middle of a pandemic.

How many of those pushing for voter ID are prepared to spend tax dollars on those issues? Texas certainly isn't.

> but voter ID's in those states have not shown to decrease minority turnout in elections.

Depends on what studies your looking at https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-14-634

I suspect you are referring to this one which a number of conservative outlets have been circulating recently: https://www.nber.org/papers/w25522

They conviently never mentioned that it also found that voter ID had no impact on fraud either.

> It's a completely fake issue.

Voter ID to prevent election fraud is a fake issue by the same metric. Yet I assume you are genuine. Why can't you extend the same courtesy to me?

You can see Voter ID laws by state - https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state and look at voter turnout. There is no correlation between those laws and turnout, which makes you wonder why people pretend there is...

There is no correlation between those laws and voter fraud, which makes you wonder why people pretend there is...

Well the problem with having no laws requiring voter ID is that you literally can't catch fraud...since you don't check for ID to see if the person should be voting.

But as serious as people take elections, it's absurd to think people wouldn't do things they shouldn't when their favorite (or least favorite) candidate is on the ballot. You think everyone just plays by the rules?

> You think everyone just plays by the rules?

Of course not! Whoever claimed this? I don't think anyone has claimed that there are no instances of fraud, to do so would be asinine, we have caught confirmed cases of fraud.

> Well the problem with having no laws requiring voter ID is that you literally can't catch fraud

The people currently in jail for it would beg to differ. This gentleman perhaps: https://news.yahoo.com/trump-supporter-charged-voter-fraud-0... Or perhaps this instance of ballot harvesting: https://www.canyon-news.com/georgia-whistle-blower-admits-to...

The reason there is so little voter fraud is the reward is so little and the risk is so great. I cast my grandmas ballot and risk 5 years in a federal prison for what? That vote has a lower chance of swaying the election that I'd have of winning the lottery with a lottery ticket. To perform fraud on the scale required to sway an election you need to coordinate a large group of people (for a Presidential election across multiple states) and all it takes is one defector to bring it all down. Frankly, if your going to attempt this scale, your not doing to attack the system anywhere that Voter ID helps. If I send people to cast ballots that's hundreds of events where I risk getting caught, no you'd want to inject ballots after they've been collected. Or some other scheme that avoids having to cast hundreds or thousands of illegal ballots individually.

In fact the reason that this is important and that people take this seriously is exactly why one should be suspicious of any politician looking to change the rules, especially when there is zero evidence to support said rule change. Who has more incentive to sway the election than the politicians in office? And there is absolutely zero legal risk in proposing a law that just so happens to help you get re-elected, unlike the individual commit voter fraud. SO politicians have all the incentive and none of the risk.

And we know they aren't afraid to use it. While specific instances are debated, no one denies gerrymandering exists. So yes, when I look at Voter ID, I don't just look at it by itself, I look at what's included in these "election security" bills that include stricter Voter ID. It's never opening more polling placing, allowing voting on multiple days, or any other measure designed to make it easier to vote. Instead it's always closing drive up voting, mail in voting, disallowing votes not cast on election days, and limiting the number of polling places in high population areas.

Then when I oppose this bill I must be "pro voter fraud" because otherwise why would I be against Voter ID? Nevermind those other measures in the bill.

I would be very much in favor of a free universal ID that can be used to vote. Then there's no objection, right?

As long as we also address the other concerns in my post. You know ensuring that everyone has easy access to getting that ID (just being free isn't enough it needs to be accessible, as does voting).

Now you just have to convince everyone else pushing for voter ID to actually put in the work (and spend the money) to get that done, and we can get this thing rolling!

Good luck!

USA does not have national voting, as voting is done in the States. It doesn't need a national ID for that.

No one wants illiterate voters either, but literacy tests are unlawful for historical reasons. It's a metagame about voter eligibility and fraud.

Illiterate people deserve the right to vote too.

There are many people who do not have a stable address, something which is needed to apply for and receive an ID.

Why should those citizens be deprived their right to vote?

An address determines which district you are eligible to vote in. The citizen still has a right to vote but where is a legitimate question because it determines which ballot they receive.

Address verification is orthogonal to identity verification.

But both are needed to cast a vote, no?

I always figure the parties hire consultants that tell them how changes to election laws will affect turnout. If it works in their favor, they'll push for it. You're not going to support something that hurts your side, even if the change may be a good idea in and of itself.

It’s a little disingenuous to paint this as “both parties are only motivated by what would help them get more votes” if one of those parties advocates policies to increase voter participation and the other advocates policies to decrease it.

Why would anyone try to increase voter participation in general unless they knew it would increase the votes for their side?

The hope would be that there is a strong institutional desire for peaceful transitions of power after open elections, and institutional opposition to anyone advocating otherwise.

Historically some governments have had such institutions to various extents.

It’s kinda the same answer to the question “why wouldn’t each side use unrestrained organized violence to attempt to hold and increase their power?”

>one of those parties advocates policies to increase voter participation

The argument could be made that they are also intentionally making it easier to cheat during the election.

These complex issues are never black and white.

That argument could be made, of course, but (like all arguments) only by presenting evidence and reasons to believe that one side’s proposals result in (or would result in) election fraud.

Why would only one side be forced to provide such evidence? The fact that almost every modern country on earth is requiring it makes me think that the burden of proof would be stronger on the side of people who think ID requirement is racist.

In the U.S. context, Black people were deliberately deprived of the right to vote for most of the country's history via seemingly-neutral requirements that were designed to stop their participation. Voter ID as proposed is an attempt to re-introduce one of these requirements.

> seemingly-neutral requirements that were designed to stop their participation

This is notably the origin of the term "grandfather clause", although its current meaning is subtly different from the original sense.

The 15th Amendment made it illegal for states to deny the right to vote directly on the basis of race, so instead they imposed new poll taxes and "literacy tests" (which were not designed as true tests, but rather as instruments to allow poll workers to arbitrarily "pass" and "fail" would-be voters), while exempting those whose grandfathers were eligible to vote before a specific date.

> Why are people honestly against ID requirements for voting?

It's mostly a fake issue to cast the administration as pro-democracy and the opposition as anti-democracy. There's no doubt that poor people sometimes find it very tough to obtain ID, and that voter ID laws benefit Republicans by a few percentage points, but Republican positions on voter ID are less to get those points than to paint themselves as the guardians of democracy against an imaginary secret cabal who are secretly manipulating elections with armies of minorities and illegal immigrants.

They're both playing the same game to different voter bases.

If Democrats seriously cared, they could simply create facilities with the stroke of a pen that would reach out to every voter and help them to obtain ID. Instead they're loudly pushing bills they don't have the votes to pass as a campaign tactic.

It's astounding that under the same administration that is fighting for the right to vote without ID, facial recognition is going to be required to file your taxes. Taxes you only have to file because of Intuit lobbyists.

What else would you expect from a government that ran on being covid rationalists but has taken a year to figure out that they should be sending people masks and tests if they want people to be wearing masks and taking tests?

> There's no doubt that poor people sometimes find it very tough to obtain ID

Perhaps this is the case, and perhaps not, but I'd like to examine this premise closer.

Has anybody provided even a single example of a US Citizen who was trying to figure out how to obtain some ID and couldn't figure out the process?

> Has anybody provided even a single example of a US Citizen who was trying to figure out how to obtain some ID and couldn't figure out the process?

Not an US citizen, but a Texas resident.

It's not only that the process is painfully complex. For instance, homeless people who don't legally own a gun or can drive a car, are effectively excluded. Same goes for students whose bills are still attached to their families, would have a hard time proving their residence status.

If one can go pass this step, providing proof of identity is equally complicated [1]. It's amusing that some of the accepted documents are even harder and way more expensive to obtain, like a passport.

Not having a social security number makes the whole process almost impossible to complete.

Point is, this shouldn't be this complicated and time consuming. Someone with low income and working two or more jobs, would have a hard time going through the process.

[1] https://www.dps.texas.gov/section/driver-license/identificat...

I appreciate that insight, but with respect, that didn't answer the question that was asked. I'm not asking for a theoretical explanation of the difficulties involved with procuring an ID, I'm asking for a real world example of just one person who couldn't manage to get one.

Certainly with such interest in this topic, there's been a journalistic expose that went into the unfortunate story of even one US citizen who was wrongly prevented from getting some kind of ID? If I had even 1 name of somebody who was wrongly deprived of an ID, it would be a lot easier to understand that there's a real issue here.

> I'm asking for a real world example of just one person who couldn't manage to get one.

Same could be said about "widespread voter ID fraud". Given that there are no such examples of this, why would anyone want to push for more stringent voter ID laws?

Anyhow, here's an example of why and how such laws target minorities and lower classes: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...

> Same could be said about "widespread voter ID fraud". Given that there are no such examples of this,

I could make many comments here about the actual election system and how recounts are designed to be worthless, but my biggest argument that I think is completely unassailable is simple: credibility. Do you want to have a credible government or not?

Here's a poll from early in 2020 that says that about 59% of Americans distrust the election system. I'm sure you could find many other polls from before and after that show that a non-trivial percentage of Americans have doubts about the election system's honesty.

https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2020-02-13/ma...

Why wouldn't we want to take the concerns of a non-trivial group seriously and work to address them? The mere fact that there's such establishment resistance to enhancing the security of and ability to audit the election system only adds fuel to the fire that there's something that they want to hide.

> why would anyone want to push for more stringent voter ID laws?

As long as we're not preventing any valid voters from voting (a legitimate concern of course), what's the argument against making the election process even more credible and secure? Please help me understand that.

> Anyhow, here's an example of why and how such laws target minorities and lower classes: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...

Let me start out by saying that this article did not meet my stated criteria of asking for a specific name of somebody who was unable to get an ID. I was very specific in asking for a name because even just one real verifiable example of a person can illustrate the issue.

Anyway, I agree that the article does highlight some theoretical issues with applying unnecessary hoops to people. I sincerely hope that all people in uncommon living situations (such as those with nonexistent addresses on an Indian Reservation or living out in the sticks somewhere) have the legal ability to vote.

To play Devil's Advocate and be a bit contrarian however, I have to point out this article was a one-sided polemic. The best anecdote from the article about the grandma showed that she was able to vote the same day once she got a little assistance. And the article made a big deal about the distances that poor folks had to travel in order to vote, but the phrase "absentee ballot" doesn't even appear in the article. The article does mention the difficulties with rural mail being slow, but doesn't give even one example where this prevented somebody from voting. I'm certainly going to keep an open mind about the struggles involved in getting ID and voting and I fully agree that any election system that exists should be easily accessible to all valid voters, but I'm not convinced from this article that there's 1 legal citizen out there who can't figure out how to ultimately acquire identification.

> Do you want to have a credible government or not?

That's not at stake, again, unless you can prove that widespread election fraud is a thing. Which, so far, isn't.

> Here's a poll from early in 2020 that says that about 59% of Americans distrust the election system.

Out of curiosity, I went to check out the actual Gallup article and poll results [1]. What it actually says is that the drop is likely driven by allegations of foreign interference and cybersecurity issues, neither had anything to do with voter ID.

A more recent poll [2] increases confidence in the electoral process to 59%. Drop in confidence is driven by republican voters. Interestingly, the issue of eligible voters not being able to cast their vote ranks higher than non eligible people casting votes. So, voter suppression is perceived as more important than voter fraud.

Let me reiterate, there is no proof of widespread voter fraud.

The issue here is that voter IDs are, sometimes, quite difficult to obtain. If republicans were serious about this issue, they would make it universal, free, and compulsory. If every single person born in the US could have an ID card issued in a matter of minutes, which is something pretty common in most developed countries, this "problem" would automatically be solved.

But this is not what Republicans want. They don't want to make it easier or cheaper to obtain a voter ID, they want to keep the current model and make it harder to vote.

> Let me start out by saying that this article did not meet my stated criteria of asking for a specific name of somebody who was unable to get an ID.

Well, this is unfortunate.

Frankly, I find it a bit dishonest to peddle the narrative that people want harsher voter ID laws, since, as stated, they care more about suppression than they do about fraud. It's also not great that your argument revolves around that voter ID laws would make elections more "secure", when there is no proof that they weren't in the first place.

A poll is not proof of anything.

Public sentiment is just that, a sentiment.

The fact that most republican voters believe that voter fraud is widespread, does not mean that they would change their minds if what they ask for is granted. And I don't need to go back too far to prove my point, because the fraud narrative has been moving goalposts since the very beginning, as they went from illegal absentee votes, to votes arriving too late to be counted, to dead people voting, to foreign votes (?) being counted, to voting machines being hacked, and so on and so forth. None of these claims could be verified, yet here we are.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/285608/faith-elections-relative...

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/321665/confidence-accuracy-elec...

because the IDs themselves are only issued by states and are intentionally withheld from demographic groups that the states would like to prevent from voting in large numbers.

The UK government has proposed making photo ID mandatory for voting (currently it's only needed in Northern Ireland), and it's been controversial for similar reasons to the USA. The legislation is currently progressing through parliament.

The Government's research shows that 2% of the UK population doesn't have any form of photo ID, and up to 9% of the population don't have a valid photo ID (i.e. one that would be recognised for voting purposes and has not expired). [0]

The idea that 9% of the population would need to go through additional processes and costs to retain the right to vote is concerning to many.

There's no ID card scheme in the UK, so people typically rely on a driving licence or passport in day to day life. These both have requirements people may not be able to meet (e.g. health conditions may prohibit a driving licence being obtained), and can be expensive.

Fortunately, the UK government has announced plans for a free voter ID card to be made available to anyone without another form of ID.

It then comes down to a cost/risk analysis. The UK government estimates it could cost something like £18 million per year to implement the photo ID requirement.

If the types of fraud that would be prevented by asking for ID are miniscule (33 allegations of voter impersonation were made in 2019 out of 50 million votes cast) and so many people don't have ID - is it worth that cost?

[0] - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

No one really is, it has majority support from both sides of politics.

Because it would be a change in the system it's used as a wedge by politicians. Additionally they know that it's harder to get out of the vote among left leaning voters, so any extra requirement would be risky in swing states. Democrat strongholds (ie Delaware) already have voter ID.

> Why are people honestly against ID requirements for voting?

Whether this idea is accurate or not is up for the reader to judge, but there's a perception in America that one of the major parties (not naming names) needs to have as many mechanisms in place to be able to cheat as possible in order to win elections.

Personally, all I'd like to know at this time is if there's any legal citizens out there who who cannot find out how to procure identification.

I'm sure they'll run a single payer healthcare system just fine.

You'd have to be very good to run a system worse than the US

Our expectations are so low that they'll manage to meet them.

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.

I dont agree with vaccine passports at all. But, if vaccine passports are required, minorities having a lower vaccination rate by choice does not make vaccine passports racist. Enough with the disparate impact BS when the policy is the same for all people across the board.

The only thing that vaccine passport requirements are discriminating against are unvaccinated people. Skin color has nothing to do with it.

> 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.

> 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.

All of American social services seem designed to delay, deny and deprive from some fear of "welfare queens."

>" 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.

An amount of fraud that would be reduced by simplifying the processes or making them universal. Currently everything is so complicated that fraud is undetectable. A good part of fraud is bad actors with expertise in these processes leaping in front of victims who find those processes unintelligible so have no idea that programs exist or if they're qualified for them.

edit: the best part is when somebody manages to fill out all of the forms, navigate the administration, get approval and help finally, then get another letter that says that they were retroactively denied benefits and have to pay them back. It's a minefield.

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.

Abolish the personal income tax would completely fix the problem.

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?

> I am torn between gross incompetence (always a good first guess when CA government is involved) and actual collusion with the criminals.

Believe none of what you hear, half of what you read, and everything that you see.

> 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.

We're already at the point where I can deepfake a person from a single photo, I'm not convinced biometric data is useful at all.

There's this old idea (~10 years old) of having the USPS become a PKI-token agency, especially because USPS already has the infrastructure to physically deliver items to every house in the USA.

These physical tokens can be as simple as a randomly-generated QR-code, or a full and proper PKI physical token / smartcard system (or anything in between).

Furthermore, USPS needs more traffic / package deliveries (especially since its lost Amazon as a customer). Increasing the amount of goods flowing around physically in the USPS system is definitely a benefit, especially if its for ensuring the physical security of these hypothetical security tokens.

----

IE: The USPS is uniquely situated to become a premier ID of the US government. Certainly more situated than the current standard, the Social Security Administration. Or the loose confederation of ~48 "RealID" state drivers license.

> especially because USPS already has the infrastructure to physically deliver items to every house in the USA.

Not accurate. I live very close to San Francisco, but I have to get my mail at a Post Office because the USPS doesn't deliver to my door.

While you're technically correct, that's the worst kind. Surely you aren't arguing against their real point that the USPS is the most equipped federal agency for getting items to people, and for having the physical real estate proximity to people to be convenient?

The USPS is completely incompetent and led by people like DeJoy who are committed to making sure the USPS continues to decline. I don’t see what you are suggesting ever happening. Republicans would fight it tooth and nail.

> There's this old idea (~10 years old) of having the USPS become a PKI-token agency

I remember common discussion of this in the early 90s, so way more than 10 years.

It does make a lot of sense. For the vast majority of people the local post office is the nearest federal government office. And the post office already handles passport applications.

These systems work by flashing screen in some coloured patterns + live feed so you're not gonna fake it.

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.

First adversary to "crack the code", will then use the photo selfie system to defraud everyone. And then government will most likely come after the persons stolen identity for compensation.

You could deepfake someone in realtime using publicly available photos. I don't know what the answer is, but photo biometrics sounds like a, "this can't possibly be hacked because I wouldn't know how to hack it scenario". Like when a naive person takes a jumble of shift, xor, and, to create a random number generator and then it turns out it has a cycle of 1024.

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.

I'd be okay providing those documents to the government. I'm not okay providing those documents to a third-party for-profit company.

This is exactly my problem. No one should be required to hand over their personal data to a private company in order to access government benefits. If the government wants to verify my ID fine, but that data should never go to anyone else or be used for profit.

I Finland we essentially have third-parties providing strong single sign on verification.

This is just verification though, all the communication goes directly to government after it...

Might require issuing some type of new ID number for each citizen, but once that is in place it would massively simplify all the processes.

Exactly the same thing that's been happening across all Europe I guess, in Italy we call it SPID (digital identity public system). Once you give them your ID and you're certified, you can access ANY public office or system via that ID. I love it.

Yes, but you see Europe has functional privacy and consumer protections laws. The USA has functional legalized highway robbery as long as it's done by corporations laws.

> submit photos of oneself

Clearly you haven't used system like this - it's pretty sophisticated sequence of light flashes to manages to somehow fingerprint that you'r not faking it.

Used it in few systems for years and it works great. One of them scanned my passport via NFC, another one just asked my details (name, DOB).

Generally I agree with you however

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?

I think a big part of the problem is worrying about all these edge cases and how people will take advantage of these services. Means testing is a prime example. We should be making more services free and open to everyone. Jeff Bezos, a homeless person, and I all have equal right to use government services. None of us should have to pay for our ID. Just give it to us all for free and if necessary raise the taxes on the people who would have paid for these services out of pocket. That improves buy in as now everyone is receiving the same level of benefit and it allows us to remove a lot of bureaucratic bloat that has built up over all these programs trying to assess an individual's eligibility.

I would argue that the edge cases are simply propped up political tools so that people can keep creating these inequalities.

America, it feels like, is egalitarian in the fact that we all have the ability to sell our souls to be rich. Some folks have a headstart certainly, but there are less blocks to our success than there are in places where family pedigree and class play an even bigger role from England and France to India and S. Korea.

We Europeans pay for id cards as well? It's part of being a society, getting these things fixed every 6 years or what not, having vaccines etc, it's not discrimination but Americans swear by their so called personal freedoms so you never get nowhere.

In Chicago, PTO is accrued at a minimum rate of 1 hour of PTO per 40 hours worked regardless of employment type or status. You guys should get with the times in the rest of the nation.

Pretty depressing that you have been conditioned to think 6.5 days of PTO a year is "with the times". That is abysmal compared to our peer nations.

It's better than the rest of the nation...

Is this post satirical? You can't seriously be holding Chicago up as an example of anything worth copying.

Lol, that's not the flex you seem to think it is.

thinking it’s a flex is missing the interesting point. Which I believe would be that PTO should be progressive and be accrued by hours worked. There shouldn’t be a requirement to be a “full time” employee before PTO is accrued because businesses can easily have people work slightly less than 40hrs/week with minimal loss to operational efficiency. If PTO accrued over hours worked regardless of full time status, businesses would have much less incentive to circumvent the system.

Let’s say we have a system where 40 hours worked = 1 day PTO:

- the business may choose to split the 40 hours among 4 employees working 10 hours each.

- however, needing to hire more employees to cover the same 40 hours (which one person alone could have handled in the legacy system) increases training and recruiting costs 4x (worst case hopefully) for each role.

- instead of circumventing the PTO “cost” altogether, the businesses would be forced to budget for it no matter how creative they get with staffing.

- budget-wise, the increased cost of PTO would effectively also be increasing the hourly wage. Further forcing businesses to scrutinize the roles they offer and question if it is really necessary to have a human being perform that function.

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.

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.

Most people already have a NFC enabled card + PIN + NFC enabled smartphone. I presume banks in US go in long lengths to verify your identify. Dunno if there's any technical reason why this could work for receiving payments or verifying your identity again.

> In the great State of California, billions in unemployment benefits were sent to the wrong people […]

> 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?

> [..] 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.

> 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?

[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...

I seem to recall there being integration in login.gov and id.me.

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?

The cynical lens says follow the lobbying dollars and personal relationships of those involved.

My cynical lens says it's an image recognition data-gathering operation expanded to a state service.

Since all (?) states take an electronic photo for a drivers license (and mine takes a thumbprint too), I'm not sure that this gives them any additional information they don't already have.

My license photo is a decade old, but I'm forced to file taxes every year.

Do you need to refresh your ID.me registration every year, or is it permanent?

I file taxes every year, but I file through my tax software or tax preparer, so I don't think I'd even need an IRS.com account.

You do not need an IRS.com account. That's what makes it look like a not-so-innocuous data collection system. This is a possible first step to tighten identity tracking, slow boiling the frog, so to speak.

Many states also sell this information to third parties.

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-...

Isn't it required that they support login.gov? Everything in other departments has been switched to login.gov over the last couple of years.

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.

[1] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...

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.

> not the actual identity matching AFAIK

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"

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.

Let the IRS know: https://www.improveirs.org/submit-a-suggestion/

Many thanks!

Update: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-28/treasury-...

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.

The stored communications act prohibits phone companies from sharing data with the police with just a request

One need merely do a web search for “parallel construction”, Joe Naccio, etc to see how well such a law stands up in face of a representatlve of your regulator demanding that you breach it.

The same applies to bank policies and privacy when it comes to doing business with certain industries.

BTW I’m pro government and pro regulation so my statements are not some sort of libertarian rant. I simply recognize that complexities and misbehavior do exist such systems.

> 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

Can you provide any government doing a better job? In Germany it's basically the same system for ID confirmation it's called postident over here.

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.

All this boils down to: in India there's a national ID database you can use, which makes this a lot simpler.

The US does not have a national ID database, and there is a lot of resistance against making one. Each state could probably use the driver's license, but that locks out people who don't drive -- a small but disproportionately marginalized group.

Government services are tricky because they need to serve everyone. That means that you have to handle a lot of special cases and struggle to categorically ban bad actors. Google can say "you've used your gmail account to send spam emails, so we're banning it". The IRS can't do that (I think even if they put you in prison for tax fraud).

If you don't drive, every state that I can think of will still assign you an ID that is just like a license, but doesn't give you permission to drive.

> The US does not have a national ID database, and there is a lot of resistance against making one.

Which is hilarious, because if you combine the databases of the SSA and IRS, you get most everything that would be in such a database anyway. SSA gives you a pretty comprehensive list of people, even non-citizens. IRS gives you an annually-updated address and some other info. Throw in the State department and you get passport information for those that have gotten one, which will include a photo.

When will people learn that phone SMS verification is not 2FA.

The sim card is reproducible by third parties and there are many of them, so it's not something you have, nor something you know, or somewhere you are.

Heck, half the "2FA methods" used today aren't actually 2FA. Software tokens? Why would this be 2FA?

I think we need to rename 2FA since it clearly has lost all meaning.

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.

I used it in the pandemic for online appointments at several agencies like "Bürgeramt", "Arbeitsamt" etc.

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.

> 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.

Copies of bills are usually requested in the US in addition to state issued photo ID, not to replace it. They are usually explained as requested as a means of verifying current residency at the address listed on the ID.

Here, private companies will just sent you a letter if they need to verify your address. The government already has access to your address, it generally doesn't need to verify it.

> via a mobile device

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?

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 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

American living abroad in the EU here.

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 was required to use it to unenroll from the child tax pre-payments which the the system defaulted me into.

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 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.

it gave me a false negative

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.

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.

This would not teach them anything. No, if they want to take away my online account, they lose the right to take my money electronically. They punish us; we punish them.

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.

I tried to setup my IRS online account but couldn't verify because I live abroad and don't have a U.S. phone number. Flagging that Id.me allows you to register with a foreign phone number (still need that data right?), you just can't complete the actual verification with that phone number. I tried to call the IRS and sat on hold for 90 minutes before giving up. I overpaid what I thought I owed (and couldn't confirm) and a month later they sent me a check for the difference. Fuck the IRS. Fuck ID-me.

I don't understand why ID.me refuses to accept my Google Voice number. They seem to be checking the phone number supplied against the numbers listed in your credit history, so if they match why not allow it?

Its frustrating because I've had the same number for 20 years, and right now it happens to be associated with a Google Voice account. It is literally my only phone number. But because of this policy I have to wait for 3 hours to video chat with someone just to get this account verified.

I've had my Google Voice number rejected at a lot of places that want an cell number for SMS -- I assume it's flagged as a VOIP number rather than a cell carrier number.

I recently ported that same number to GoogleFi and now it works everywhere.

Whatever the database is that they use, it's updated quickly, I tried using my new GoogleFi number at my bank the day after I ported it to Fi and it worked, while they still refuse to send an SMS code to my Google Voice numbers.

They probably use something like twilio API that can tell you which provider is behind a NANP phone number.

Yes. 'it's flagged as a VOIP number'.

Last week I had a DHL delivery and they required account setup so I could validate my delivery address, or that was the excuse. Account setup required validation via email and SMS. SMS never arrives to VoIP phone.

If the number isnt tied to an IMEI, then how are they supposed to use it track you as your phone pings different towers?

I'm another person whose Google Voice number is their only phone number, this blocks me from a lot of services. Extremely frustrating.

As an expat American I was originally super pleased to see something like this was finally happening, however, this was quickly diminished once I tried signing up. It requires documents like a phone bill in English to verify my identity, which I simply cannot provide.

Norway has an electronic id system, and when I went back over christmas, before I had verified that I could "pretend to be a foreigner" when filling in covid entry documentation, I figured I'd try getting one of those id's finally, since you can use them all over the place for Norwegian based services. I moved to the UK before they became common, so I've never had one.

Cue catch-22: To get one I needed to be able to receive mail at the address held by Norwegian tax authorities. They require you to file one notification when you move out of the country giving your new address, but not only don't require you to file notifications when you move again, but actively tell you not to. You can however tell them your new postal address which will be registered separately.

Except I'd never bothered before because I had no reason to, and now, to register a new postal address online or in fact to even get to the page that tells you how to file one, you need to log in with the an electronic id.

Fun times. I sent them an e-mail before christmas asking how exactly they expected me to be able to inform them of my new postal address - I'm sure they do have a fallback - but they've not yet answered.

Thankfully the department responsible for the covid entry forms answered my e-mails within an hour or two and told me it was fine to just fill in the form intended for foreign citizens so figuring out the electronic id it is now only a slightly amusing exercise in questioning the workings of bureaucracy (there workarounds I'm fairly certain would work involving showing up at the embassy or arranging to get a Norwegian bank account opened via the London office of a Norwegian bank, but since I don't actually need one, I haven't bothered exploring those)

I'm one of those weirdos who still uses checks to submit quarterly taxes. I'd rather pay the $20 every few years for new basic checks instead of digitally integrating with the IRS. I'm not doing anything bad or sketchy either, I just feel more comfortable doing it by check.

I've thought about converting to digital next year but with this new policy, there's no chance of that.

I guess you're not in California? Which requires online payment. Note that paying estimated tax doesn't today require a login, so I am pretty sure this won't change that. It's just like signing up for a service -- super one click easy. It's the cancelling that's hard.

Ah, yep I'm in NY where state taxes are encouraged to be done digitally but it's not a hard requirement. My accountant sends the vouchers every quarter.

I didn't realize estimated taxes didn't require a login. That's promising. Thanks for the tip. Although I just checked online on the official irs.gov site and it looks like they charge you additional fees for paying electronically. It would be cheaper for me to buy checks and stamps than to pay their $2.50 debit transaction fee 8 times per year (1 state + 1 fed x 4).

no there's no charge. there's a credit fee if you use a credit card, and i guess you're saying there's a debit fee for a debit card, but since you pay by check today anyway just pay by e-check instead.

I think there's a $2.50 fee if you pay by debit card based on this https://www.irs.gov/payments/pay-your-taxes-by-debit-or-cred....

Unless I'm misreading that it's saying if I pay through a debit card I will be charged $2.50 based on "$2.50 flat fee for consumer or personal debit card". I have a personal debit card hooked up to my checking account.

I'll circle up with my accountant to double check. If there's a no login solution to pay all estimated taxes electronically without a fee and I can control when the transaction happens by entering a debit card I'd consider using that.

That makes sense, they just pass the debit fee on to you. However e-check is an ACH transaction. I've never seen any online payment site that charges for e-check as I believe there isn't an individual transaction fee associated to ACH.

Just because your debit card is connected to checking, doesn't mean that if you pay by e-check it automatically invokes the debit fee. It's only if you pay via the debit method, eg if you don't want to give our your true account number for some [wrong] reason.

I am absolutely certain there is no charge as this is the one and only way I pay taxes, and like you I would mail a check if there were any fee at all attached to e payment.

Ah now I remember why I don't file electronically.

For estimated taxes to NY it only allows "direct debit from bank account" which is classified on Wikipedia as:

"A direct debit or direct withdrawal is a financial transaction in which one person (or company) withdraws funds from another person's bank account."

I don't like the idea of the government having direct access to my bank with an ability to pull funds whenever they choose to.

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but the government already has this ability, whether you pay electronically or not. When you write a check, the money is in fact transferred electronically, just with a paper authorization as middleman. Do you know you can write any date whatsoever on the check and it doesn't matter? Also the amount can be completely illegible. Doesn't matter. Writing a check isn't any kind of "defense" against the thing you don't like. I don't believe the tax authorities accept cash, but I may be wrong. That would be your only way to limit their reach.

If "direct debit" incurs the fee, then yes, I too would write a check. Not sure from the description if that is functionally equivalent to e-check or ACH, or if it means the same as "debit card".

Avoiding the fee is useful, but avoiding the reach is impractical and not achieved with a check.

>California? Which requires online payment.

Only for those who have had to make a payment in the past of $20,000 or more at one time, so the vast majority of CA taxpayers are not subject to this requirement. And the penalty is 1% so it is not out of the question to pay by non-electronic means and accept the penalty.

Washington claims to "require" online payments for business taxes but they keep cashing my paper checks.

Call their bluff using certified mail.

It's disconcerting that id.me seems to be managing access to government services and some kind of online shopping mall at the same time:

https://shop.id.me/

At first I thought this was just a white label of one of the many discounts-as-a-service platforms out there... but no, the code makes it clear that this platform was developed specifically for id.me, with all assets in their S3 bucket and specific homegrown analytics code where it would otherwise make no sense to hardcode IdMe in an event name. This definitely feels like an unfocused company that just obtained a massive contract. I'd be very curious to dig into the RFP process here and who else bid on the opportunity.

Welp, better download everything now because it looks like I won't be using the IRS website any more.

They can have a nice video of me giving them the middle finger for subjecting citizens to such a user-painful and elderly-discriminatory system.

There are saner, more humane ways to prevent fraud.

On Monday one of the developers on my team told me he might have to drop out of our meeting. He'd been on hold with ID.me for 3.5 hours in order to get to his IRS data. Midway through the meeting he said that his call had just been disconnected and he was going to have to start again from the beginning.

It seems like this "service" may not scale.

Its always a fun thought experiment to understand the source of "truth" for ones ID in the USA. The main source is your Birth Records. but these can be lost and do often as older records are rather scattered about. If your older they want proof of stuff in your name like bills and other records, but these tend to be what ever name you gave them over the phone. Bank records are based off SSN or Driver ID, and thats based off your birth records. What if your birth records are lost? Lets say you have nothing, No ID, No Records, What do you do? how do you prove yourself is really your old you?

Is anyone else disturbed by this?

Yes. I won't be using it, that's for damn sure.

I'm disturbed, but it started a long time ago.

If you have a drivers license or a passport your face is already in a whole host of photo recognition databases. If you've ever applied for a credit card, bought insurance or made an insurance claim, paid a utility bill, received a professional license, been party to a lawsuit, bought a house or car, rented an apartment, it's in a database like LexisNexis (You can order yours free, mine was >100 pages). And for the record, these private companies turn it over to law enforcement for a monthly subscription fee without a warrant and at the click of a button.

The reality is, privacy is dead. All aspects of our lives are tracked and recorded. The only question is what comes next.

Agreed, although I don't know what "paying a utility bill" means in this context.

It’s just more information that can be pieced together via parallel construction to nail you without a warrant. Every time you pay a bill it has your address, service address, account information, and so on associated with it. Your local law enforcement will pull this up as easily as you do a Google Search. It’s legal because they volunteer this information to consumer reporting agencies that make a profit selling it to the government. Welcome to the capitalistic public-private spy state.

I understand the need e.g. to ensure that the proper person is getting tax refunds or benefits, but I am bothered by it. I am not sure, however, how to have at the same time a strong method to identify people that isn't also ripe for abuse.

I guess just doing away with government benefits and individual taxes is another way to go. I'd be all on board with that.

I'm skeptical that this "video ID" thing is going to be as effective as the vendor is promising it will be, but government needs to be doing _something_ more effective to authenticate tax filers.

At the start of the pandemic fraudsters used my PII to collect unemployment benefits through Washington State ESD. As I understood it, all the fraudsters had to do was fill in my name, SSN, and address into a web form and click the "give me moneys now plz" button. Then to add insult to injury ESD shared my fraudulently-provided PII with Accellion, who promptly re-leaked it.

My PII has been leaked in at least 4 separate breaches that I'm aware off, the culprits ranging from health insurance providers to cell phone companies. Whatever collections of PII are circulating among groups of criminals, my info has been in them for years now.

This means that every year I have to worry about whether a fraudster is going to submit an IRS return in my name before I have a chance to get all the documents I need to file, and then I'll have to deal with that massive PITA on top of all the typical bullshit that is paying taxes in the United States.

>every year I have to worry about whether a fraudster is going to submit an IRS return in my name

Just get an IRS Identity Protection PIN (IP PIN), this will prevent anyone else from filing a return for you. However, you may need the new IRS login service in order to retrieve your IP PIN each year.

From personal experience with a family friend and bitcoin scammers, this does not work any better than prior forms of verification.

The scammers just convince you to take a picture and send it to them and then they submit it on your behalf.

Americans abroad don't have a USA verifiable cell phone/landline so they're stuck...

I have a passport. I had to go to a US postal facility and talk to a real human, who took a real picture, we had a chat, I had to provide my old passport, and a month or so later I got the new passport and the old one was returned.

We have SSL certs. They /can/ issue certs, the govt /can/ be a CA. This is the real tech, it's been worked on for years and is actively worked on today.

Weird things are happening right now, all over the place, at many different levels of government; and I don't mean good things. I kinda think it looks like sabotage, hate to say it. (The State of Washington gave me a government email account last year to renew my drivers' license, and I could mint more.)

It's a wild ride, and it'll either correct or this is the "end of the Bronze Age", folks.

IRS advertises a web site for document uploads, as first message, even before getting to the main menu, of one of their 800 numbers, but when called to verify receipt no one knows how this system works, so they ask to have documents faxed. When asked where the uploaded documents could be, one gets this very strong feeling of documents going who knows where, for use... or abuse. Adding another system like id.me now with pictures and videos of tax payers sounds extremely reassuring, to complete the package of things in possession of no one knows where things are, at IRS.

I discovered this issue last night with the selfie requirement and ID.me when I attempted to log in to the IRS website to make a payment with my already verified ID.me account. Today I sent a letter via form to ID.me. It is my belief that this is part of the continued agenda to track us and violate privacy - this includes the Real ID agenda, which is also unnecessary when you have a government issued passport. Data will be linked to identity and movements and we don't yet know how they all use this additional video and camera access on our "smart" phones. If you also find this a violation of our privacy and overstepping necessary ID verification, please join me in writing a letter to ID.me demanding a change in policy or simply copy and paste my letter below. Link to submit "https://help.id.me/hc/en-us/requests"

"Hello, I attempted to login to my IRS account to make a payment. Even though I've already verified my ID.Me you are now mandating that I give you a selfie video. There is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON for me to give ID.Me access to my phone camera or further visual of my person or likeness. This is a total violation of my privacy and I DO NOT CONSENT. I'm writing to notify you that I am vehemently opposed to this requirement by ID.Me and I urge you to stop this requirement. I attempted to access the IRS.gov site from my phone and desktop. Both required me to provide a selfie video. I am extremely upset by this new requirement and even more so by the fact that I can't contact you to notify you as such without filling in a form. Please contact your product team and management and tell them to roll back the selfie requirement now. It is not necessary and it's a privacy violation. You are overstepping your boundaries and I won't be complicit. Moreover, I've been notified that you, in lockstep with the IRS, plan to make this the only way that American citizens can access our IRS accounts. The IRS is not a federal institution. It is a private entity that is run by banking interests and earns interest on printing US dollars. I demand access to my account with the existing government-issued identification and verifications points that I already provided to you. I look forward to your response outlining how ID.me will resolve this concern immediately."

One point you made I agree with -- I already had a verified ID.me account for my California driver's license upgrade to REAL ID, so I did not expect that there would be additional hurdles to use the same existing login with IRS. My REAL ID verification should be sufficient, shouldn't it?

I have a lot of issues with dysmorphia and frankly kind of loathe seeing myself through the shitty front facing camera lens of most smartphones. I hope this type of auth doesn't catch on.

Could be claim for ADA reasonable accommodation to not do it.

What happens if you don't have a smart phone? Can you just not log in?

You can also use a computer with a webcam. But I don't know how one would do it without access to a smartphone or webcam.

You apparently can use a webcam although I assume most people who don't have a smartphone don't have a webcam either.

The reality is that not having a smartphone means it's increasingly difficult to access any number of services.

Which is differentially harmful to the poor and the elderly.

You have to provide old-fashioned alternatives to all the new whiz-bang high-tech shinyness.

> IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for *Online Access*

Surely the subset of people who want "Online" access and don't have a mobile phone and don't have a webcam is tiny. Those people can use the "Offline" access, whatever that is but I assume there is some system that predates the internet that allows people to get access to their IRS info.

I'm in the US and I don't have an online IRS account. I assume many/most don't.

> I'm in the US and I don't have an online IRS account.

Then this change doesn't affect you? What am I missing?

It kinda does. It means that if we don't want someone to go in and use our accounts for tax fraud, we have to go in and sign up now to prevent someone from else from signing up as us.

From the sound of it, we just need to find a good 4-8 hours where we can do nothing but verify our identity. Then when that fails, we can spend a bunch of time finding other documents, then show those and hope they work. Hopefully the IRS is open on weekends...

Fair point. That pretty much moots my objection.

There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of IRS offices across the nation where you can go and deal with them in person. Most towns of any significant size have one. You probably need to make an appointment, etc. but it is still possible to deal with them face-to-face, and once you get in there you are talking to someone who has back-office access not available to the public and are able to deal with a lot of problems (e.g. a mistake on some form, or a missing document) immediately.

I only ever deal with my irs account twice a year (once to get my PIN and once if I need to look up past info). I would rather use mail now (printers take 10 seconds to print), and another minute to mail.

I'm not going to give my biometric information to this company AND wait and unspecified amount of hours to video chat with a stranger while holding my PII.

From the link:

> The MFA options range from a six-digit code sent via text message or phone call to code generator apps and FIDO Security Keys. ID.me even suggests using its own branded one-time code generating app, which can “push” a prompt to your mobile device for you to approve whenever you log in. I went with and would encourage others to use the strongest MFA option — a physical Security Key. For more on the benefits of using a Security Key for MFA, see this post.

So they don't allow MFA via email? I hope at least they allow the phone number to be international.

> After this, ID.me requires the verification of your phone number, which means they will ask your mobile or landline provider to validate you are indeed an existing, paying customer who can be reached at that number. ID.me says it currently does not accept phone numbers tied to voice-over-IP services like Google Voice and Skype.

How does this work if you don't have a US number?

edit: From this thread: https://www.expatforum.com/threads/us-irs-id-me-sign-in-app....

> Correct, I spoke to an IRS rep yesterday and he told me that it is practically impossible for a non-US resident to gain online access to their records or other service. The security ID process demands US phone and street addresses. They can't set it up for you either so there's no point in asking

...

> One document they asked for is a current electricity bill to confirm the address, had to be less than 90 days old. Not possible unless you have a property in the US.

...

> Both, ID.me told me they are not allowed to register non-US residents so I called the IRS. They confirmed that and also that they could not register me for an online account either. Welcome to the 21st century!

Wow you really can't make this idiocy up.

I went through this earlier this week, to pay estimated taxes. Fortunately the automated process worked for me, so I didn't have to go through the writer's additional verification. It was a bit tedious, but not a difficult process, all performed on my Mac laptop.

The only thing I didn't like was having to download their authenticator app...and I'm still not sure if it was required, of if I could have used the Google authenticator I have for my other 2FA tokens.

Of course, the level of difficulty here is that you have to have your ID documents scanned or in a scannable form, that you have to do a video selfie, etc. My wife, for example, has the hardware and software needed to do this, but not the flexibility and patience I've gained from a few decades of digital frustration to actually use all her tools to see this process through.

Absolutely chilling. Can sort of see the use for refund fraud but not payments. Almost was not able to pay taxes last time because of all the details it demanded and was not happy with my answers. Preventing my taxes from being paid is not a “service” I need.

Guess I’m going back to paper checks soon. :-/

I noticed that the IRS disabled logging in using the perfectly fine accounts we had previously. Instead I am promoted to sign up with this random private company and give up my own privacy to do something very basic. Disgusting.

I feel like requiring users to enter into a legal agreement with a private third party in order to perform legally required obligations for a government entity has some troubling edge cases.

What happens if a user has a dispute with ID.me, who decides to terminate their account for violating their ToS? Something tells me they will still be on the hook to pay their taxes (presumably via paper, for however long that's still supported).

What if person can't utilize phone/camera due to ADA claim? What is the reasonable accommodation?

I'm not sure if this is "absolutely new".

A few months ago my wife and I had to do some stuff through the IRS. And in order to login through ID.me. We had do an actual video session with ID.me so they could see our drivers licenses, SSN cards, and a few background questions. In order to verify our identity.

It was a bit time consuming rather than just logging in. But with so much identity theft, I think something like this was inevitable.

What aspect of "the IRS" is being discussed here ?

I don't believe I have ever had an account with the IRS for any reason and have not interacted with them online and have no plans to.

On the other hand, the IRS payment portal (EFTPS), which I do use, is not mentioned anywhere in the article or here in the HN discussion thread.

Is this for EFTPS access ?

Or is there some other "IRS account" that I've never discerned a need for ?

>Or is there some other "IRS account" that I've never discerned a need for ?

Yes. Your taxpayer account, for getting tax return transcripts and so on.

The joke is, congress won't consider fixing the identity situation, as it upsets conspiracy types that are paranoid about the government collecting information on them (but somehow states doing it is fine?). So instead multiple private corporations are doing it for the government.

It's one of those nice "worst of all possible options" solutions.

That is awesome! Seems like it will help a lot of old people who have the most risk both from covid and scam calls. If your social security number and taxes are going to be online, definitely need some kind of additional security beyond the usual signup process. If it requires a live video feed that should make it quite a bit harder for scammers.

I tried id.me and it was a pain in the ass to use and failed on one part. I'm guessing with their anti-fraud style fail closed system this will effectively lock out a lot of old people from using their online services.

It's hard to have additional security and still have things work for everyone. But it's a numbers game. Covid is over 100x more deadly for people over 75 versus below age 35. Anything that keeps old people out of crowded Social Security buildings is a good thing. And it will block a lot of scams as well.

> Covid is over 100x more deadly for people over 75 versus below age 35. Anything that keeps old people out of crowded Social Security buildings is a good thing.

I don't think I follow. Won't adding these complicated and buggy requirements to the online site make it more likely elderly people need to go into a physical office?

What do you think the over/under for months until there's a security breech of ID.me?

A negative number.

I am honestly curious how an administration that is sooo against voter ID squares it hypocrisy with things like this, or other ID based initiatives designed to secure these institutions but ID requirements to secure voting is viewed as racist or other "threat to democracy"

If Secure ID is needed to access IRS, or for proof of vaccination I fail to see why is not needed for voting...

Absolutely.

On the other hand, the other side is just as cynically hypocritical, just in the opposite directions.

The problem is that ID access is far from equitable and the burden it raises is way out of proportion to the claimed problem (if you think about it, in-person voter fraud has a huge risk component and a tiny reward). Voting is the most fundamental right in a democracy so restricting that needs to be well justified.

Most people on the left would happily accept a free universal federal ID program (with appropriate safeguards to ensure equity of access) but conservatives oppose this.

Federal ID program would be opposed on the grounds of Federalism. rightly so. ID should be left to the states not the Federal government.

We are a federalist nation for a reason, people on the left do not support federalism, conservatives do, that is why they oppose that.

>The problem is that ID access is far from equitable

But is that not true for everything else as well, thus my question, if getting an ID is soo burdensome (which I do not believe it is) why is it OK to demand it for all of these other requirements the federal government places on people (like paying taxes) but not ok for voting.

Simply saying "ID is not equitable" does not resolve the question

Make a secure ID free and easily to get access to and voter ID concern melts away. Don't pretend that there is no barrier to getting an ID.

Every single state that has a voter ID law, as a Free ID for the purposes of voting that can be easily obtained.

It is false to claim other wise

“Easily be obtained”

Doubtful. Not only do they take time (time off from job, time for travel) but they require certain documents which you may or may not have. Even if said documents are free to re-obtain (think SS card or birth certificate) it still takes time and energy to track down. Time is not free. Voting is a right, barriers to it are not ok. In-person voter fraud is practically non-existent and we catch most all who do it. It’s a solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist essentially.

>In-person voter fraud

Aside from the fact we are moving away from in-person voting, and mailin voting is far less secure to the point where many other nations do not do it.

The claim the there is no fraud is has many many problems and based on a huge amount of assumption. There is very little actual transparency, there is the appearance of transparency, but any time anyone asks any questions is a response of "HOW DARE YOU QUESTION THE ELECTION", the election is secure because we said it was secure is not a valid position. nor is the position of "well show me the fraud" because the average person lacks the legal standing to actually investigate anything. Instead we have a system of "we investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong"

The same people that accept this from the election boards, do not accept this from the police... which is another example of political hypocrisy

Well there's been well documented/discovered issues with law enforcement and 0 instances of significant documented/discovered issues with voter fraud on a scale that could impact anything.

There have only been documented discovered issues because every person has a phone, and records the police actions in the real time

We do not have that opportunity with the election system, but there have been documented questions around voting machines irregularities, process issues, and other non-transparent issues with the process that are dismissed out of hand because "there is no evidence" however no one is allowed to investigate to obtain said evident thus there will always be no evidence

I'd guess (A) Voter ID laws are transparently intentionally designed to inconvenience as many liberal voters and as few conservative voters as possible, and (B) there is no other way to vote if you can't get a voter ID, but there is another way to pay your taxes without this online access. Not defending this decision though; this is a bizarre requirement. Is this more regulatory capture by Intuit / TurboTax?

My favorite video on this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW2LpFkVfYk

They first go to Berkeley, California and ask a bunch of white people their thoughts on voter idea laws. "They're racist, african americans don't know where the DMV is, don't have access to the Internet" type of answers.

Then they go to Harlem and ask people's thoughts on it.

>I am honestly curious how an administration that is sooo against voter ID

They're not against voter ID on principal. They're against it as a marketing tactic.

I don't mean to sound cynical or conspiratorial, that's just campaigning.

It's the dems in this case, but the following also applies to the repubs: neither are against an intrusive or abusive government. They're actively for it. The only thing that tempers their appetite is remaining electable.

JPGs are not security, and moving JPGs can be fabricated very easily. Some v-tuber software with a deepfake GAN strapped to it I feel like would fool 1-on-1 meetings too.

I got my weekend project.

Do you think a company should be able to opt out of UI by offering unconditional severance?

And millions of Americans will gleefully comply, "because of the convenience".

So the scammer just has to go on social media and get a profile picture?

OTP app would seem a better idea

I already had to do this a month ago, using the id.me service to view my IRS account

Previously, you could not create an IRS account if you did not have debt. :^)

I had to use ID.me for something earlier this year (I forget what), and while it was not a terrible experience technically, I literally had to shave off my beard to complete it, as my drivers license photo is me with a freshly shaved face.

That sounds like a terrible experience. Please modify your body (albeit non-permanently) in this particular way in order for this app to work.

What if I said you had to sing "mary had a little lamb" exactly in the key of F# in order for a login to work? I think we'd classify that as a terrible experience.

lack of understanding of new technologies and internet in general from governments is scary

where do they seek help to think about developing such useless systems?

End mandatory income tax. Replace with usury tax.

I'm excited for them to meet my local CPA.

This is such a simple problem. I really can’t believe it. Just give people strong passwords, strong backup passwords and maintain identity verification stations at post offices. If both your password and backup password are compromised, or to settle an identity dispute, just go to the post office and produce irrefutable evidence including biometrics. But if you just remember your password this should almost never be necessary. Am I crazy?

Cue the emergence of "This taxpayer does not exist."

"Your estimated wait time is 3 hours and 27 minutes"

Hmm. Guessing this will get rolled back when they figure out people are going to all come in deadline based waves. There's no way to staff for a "real person identifies you" process with how the IRS currently works.

To be clear, there is currently no good alternative to this. The way I see it, the IRS can switch to an invasive "selfie + utility bill" system, or it can remove self-service from their website altogether. It's important to keep tax information secure in order to protect the elderly and disadvantaged. After all, the victims of ID theft in tax are primarily taxpayers who are not regularly filing returns (like elderly and zero-income folks), since two "competing" returns will quickly alert the IRS to a problem.

The legacy IRS identity protection measures are both cumbersome and insecure, so getting rid of the latter problem is a big improvement.

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