This summer the IRS will require users to log in via ID.me, which uses facial recognition in its authentication process, to file taxes, make payments, and more
whose product does not work reliably—has embedded itself in government functions across the country https://twitter.com/... David Greene / @davidgreene : Oh FFS, please just audit rich people who routinely cheat on their taxes instead of doing shit like this: https://gizmodo.com/... Jackie / @hackingbutlegal : We are an ethical steward of your personal information and are committed to supporting your rights: You may destroy your https://id.me/ credential and associated data at any time.* *Asterisk means just kidding lmao https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... @emptywheel : These IRS regulations might be usefully reported by comparing the efficacy of them to what (for example) online notaries have adopted during COVID and/or what the EU requires for KYC. ONE reason they seem weird in US is bc US doesn't police money-laundering. https://twitter.com/... Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : IRS Will Require Facial Recognition Scans to Access Your Taxes Online // talk about shipping orgchart dot gov what about “https://login.gov/ i...a secure sign in service used by the public to sign in to participating government agencies.” https://gizmodo.com/... Kashmir Hill / @kashhill : Reading that the IRS is going to ask website users to verify their identities with facial recognition, but only to check account records not to get refunds... which is odd. https://gizmodo.com/... https://twitter.com/... Jackie / @hackingbutlegal : tl;dr IRS trying to fight fraud so they're forcing Americans who want to get tax data from the IRS online to submit biometric data in the form of a selfie (to a third-party company) to verify themselves. This is very, very bad, and every tech-aware American should fight it. https://twitter.com/... @hypervisible : “Just as we probably don't want Amazon or Facebook controlling access to our tax records or a government lifeline when things go wrong, it isn't clear we should want ID. me to be everywhere we want to be.” (FWIW, it's super clear many don't want that) https://www.bloomberg.com/... Shawn Donnan / @sdonnan : We took a deep dive into the world of https://id.me/ for this @BW feature out today: https://www.bloomberg.com/... But this thread from @briankrebs is very good at getting into why https://id.me/ is becoming part of many taxpayers' digital lives. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The IRS was set to make ID.me — a private vendor whose authentication reportedly does not work reliably — the sole gateway to online tax filing and payments this summer, embedding facial recognition into a core civic function. A Bloomberg profile framed the stakes by noting ID.me's claim to have uncovered $400B in pandemic unemployment theft, the justification for its rapid spread across government agencies nationwide.
The backlash was immediate and bipartisan, and it worked: within weeks the IRS committed to transitioning away from facial recognition entirely, ID.me agreed to make automated face verification optional for government partners with scan deletion from March 1, and taxpayers gained a fallback of verifying themselves through a virtual interview with agents.
First-order effects
- Every taxpayer who wants an online IRS account this summer would have had to enroll with ID.me and submit to facial recognition, handing one private company a monopoly position over access to federal tax data.
- ID.me's reliability problems become the IRS's problem directly: failed verifications now block people from filing and paying, not just from logging into a commercial service.
Second-order effects
- The bipartisan backlash forced the IRS into an about-face on facial recognition, and pushed ID.me to offer opt-out verification and face-scan deletion to all its government partners — concessions that ripple to every state agency that adopted it for unemployment systems.
- The agent-conducted virtual interview fallback shifts verification labor back onto the IRS itself, creating a manual bottleneck precisely where the automation was supposed to save money.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mandatory biometric identity checks by private vendors become politically untenable for core government services, pushing agencies toward consent-based or human-verified alternatives.
- Deletion rights over face scans — which ID.me conceded under pressure — set a template for how citizens can claw back biometric data collected at scale by government contractors.
The trend: Governments outsourcing identity verification to private biometric vendors are colliding with a hard political limit on compulsory facial recognition, forcing hybrid human-plus-software fallbacks.