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A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers alternative to ID.me

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Re: A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers alternative to ID.me

#31

Post by toast0 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #20

Yes, there's a solution, it's called one's social security number. If people are fraudulently abusing the social security number system, stealing other people's numbers and so on, then they should be prosecuted for fraud. Implementing a Chinese-style facial recognition and social credit score program in order to keep tabs on everyone is just another authoritarian fantasy project, and government incompetence during th…

> If people are fraudulently abusing the social security number system, stealing other people's numbers and so on, then they should be prosecuted for fraud.

Who's going to do that? My spouse had an Oakland luxury apartment rented in her name, with her social security number and everything. But Oakland PD won't do anything, and nobody else cares either. The apartment management wasn't even sure they could evict because of covid restrictions at the time. It's fully reported, not our problem anymore.

Re: A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers alternative to ID.me

#32

Post by thayne »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #21

> Five years later and more than $187 million in government investment later, however, it still hasn’t been widely rolled out. I know anything like this is going to be more complicated than it seems. Integration of lots of legacy systems, of which the federla government is probably about as complicated as it gets, with the most security-sensitive application possible. Still, and I'm really not an expert here, but I a…

Part of that big price tag is likely because of requirements for any kind of government contracted software, some of which are reasonable, some of which are not. Often companies charge a lot more for complying with those requirements. The Fedramp version of most SaaS offerings is significantly more expensive than the non-fedramp version. And part of that is just to cover paying the higher prices for their dependencies to be fedramp compliant.

Re: A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers alternative to ID.me

#33

Post by [deleted] »

mike_d wrote: post #26
netfortius wrote: post #13

Why couldn't they design and offer alternatives similar to the French tax services (alongside many other French online services) [1]? [1] https://franceconnect.gouv.fr/franceconnect

Because it is the law in the United States that agencies must transition to the centrally managed login.gov. ID.me never should have been rolled out in the first place.

[deleted]

Re: A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers alternative to ID.me

#35

Post by irrational »

akira2501 wrote: post #24
jrochkind1 wrote: post #21

> Five years later and more than $187 million in government investment later, however, it still hasn’t been widely rolled out. I know anything like this is going to be more complicated than it seems. Integration of lots of legacy systems, of which the federla government is probably about as complicated as it gets, with the most security-sensitive application possible. Still, and I'm really not an expert here, but I a…

> with the most security-sensitive application possible. I certainly don't see my tax returns that way.. is that a commonly held view?

Doesn’t it have your social security number?

Re: A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers alternative to ID.me

#36

Post by akira2501 »

irrational wrote: post #35
akira2501 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with the most security-sensitive application possible. I certainly don't see my tax returns that way.. is that a commonly held view?

Doesn’t it have your social security number?

Conventionally, yes.. but there's no reason the IRS has to use this alone to identify me. Conceivably, it would be very easy to check a box on my W-9 and have a unique yearly "Tax ID" generated and placed on my W-2. Then I can file using that unique number and the imputed need of the highest security ever can just evaporate.

Re: A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers alternative to ID.me

#37

Post by OkGoDoIt »

irrational wrote: post #35
akira2501 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with the most security-sensitive application possible. I certainly don't see my tax returns that way.. is that a commonly held view?

Doesn’t it have your social security number?

I run a small business and I need to collect W-9's from basically everyone I ever pay, which means I have an absurd amount of SSN's in PDFs sitting in a folder on my computer. It feels very wrong, but apparently that's how taxes work. Kind of makes SSN's feel less secure/protection-worthy than I used to believe shrug

Re: A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers alternative to ID.me

#38

Post by hansvm »

> “Login.gov can handle less than 30 transactions per second,” Rettig told lawmakers. “We need more than about 1,500 transactions per second.”

Even on a $2/mo VPS that's enough for image recognition in something as slow as Python. What gives?

Re: A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers alternative to ID.me

#39

Post by curryberto »

OkGoDoIt wrote: post #37
irrational wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t it have your social security number?

I run a small business and I need to collect W-9's from basically everyone I ever pay, which means I have an absurd amount of SSN's in PDFs sitting in a folder on my computer. It feels very wrong, but apparently that's how taxes work. Kind of makes SSN's feel less secure/protection-worthy than I used to believe shrug

First job out of college I was given, with no oversight or training, access to thousands of peoples SSNs, names, phone numbers and addresses. I also had a private investigator locate someone from my childhood once and got not only their phone number, address, and SSN but their entire family and neighbors and anyone who had a name similar to theirs. It's outrageous how insecure everything is.

Re: A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers alternative to ID.me

#40

Post by sofixa »

netfortius wrote: post #13

Why couldn't they design and offer alternatives similar to the French tax services (alongside many other French online services) [1]? [1] https://franceconnect.gouv.fr/franceconnect

To expand on this, France Connect is open source and uses open standards (OAuth), so any government can adopt it.
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