The IRS will soon make you use facial recognition to access your taxes online

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The IRS will use facial recognition to verify online taxpayers.

Alex Castro is the illustrator for The Verge.

People who access and pay their taxes online will be required to enroll in a third-party facial recognition company. Those who have already registered on IRS.gov will need to provide a government ID, a copy of a utility bill, and a selfies to ID.me, a Virginia-based identity verification company. It seems likely that people with older hardware or who don't have access to one will have problems with the video selfies that you'll take with whatever device you use to sign up.

The IRS says that ID.me is a trusted technology provider of identity verification services. Anyone with an ID.me account from another government agency can sign in. The sign-up process for a new ID.me account was time-consuming and glitchy according to Brian Krebs. He got stuck about halfway through the process and had to start again from the beginning, but he was forced to join a video call with an ID.me representative, which took nearly three and a half hours.

Related.

The majority of US government agencies use facial recognition.

ID.me doesn't sell, lead, or trade its data to any third parties or derive any profit from the sale, lease or trade of its data. When you register for an ID.me account, you have to accept the company's consent policy, as well as the fact that it can share information with its partners with explicit permission. The company collects facial and voice biometrics to verify identity and protect against fraudulent behavior and to comply with a request from law enforcement or government entities where not prohibited by law. The company may retain your data for several years, depending on the nature of the data and relevant legal or operational retention needs.

More than two dozen states use ID.me to verify people applying for unemployment benefits. In June of 2021, it was reported that ID.me failed to identify some applicants and that they had difficulty reaching anyone at the company to remedy their problem. The CEO of ID.me said in the past that it uses a system similar to Apple's FaceID or the way a TSA agent would compare a passenger's face to their ID at an airport.