3 minute read
Your Money
Your Money Let’s Face the Music and Dance
By Allan Rolnick, CPA
On March 10, 1876, a Scottish-born engineer named Alexander Graham Bell uttered the words, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you” and changed how humanity interacts with the world. Today, Bell’s “talking telegraph” has morphed into the internet, and billions of humans use it every day to work, play, and watch misleading propaganda videos.
But there’s one problem the internet hasn’t solved: verifying who we are when we go to sign in. That password you’ve used since 2005? Not good enough anymore without at least one special character. Endless security questions, like “what was your childhood dog’s first car?” When yet another site asks you to check a box to prove you’re not a robot, are you ever tempted to just say, “Dude, you’re the robot!”
The IRS, which still doesn’t use email with taxpayers, loses millions every year to thieves who sidestep those verifications. They also run one of Uncle Sam’s busiest websites, with nearly 2 billion visits per year. Last November, they announced a newand-improved verification process. How will they guarantee it’s you and not some Nigerian prince logging in? Just upload a video of your face, along with your driver’s license or other government-issued ID, and wait for the facial recognition gods to do their work. Easy-peasy!
Of course, the IRS knows most Americans won’t trust them to manage that sort of information. So they’ve paid $86 million to outsource verify your identity, not one-to-many scanning to pick you out of an electronic lineup. They claim nine out of ten users should be able to verify themselves within five minutes. Those who can’t, wind up video chatting with an actual human after an “average” eight-minute wait. (Just don’t tell that to the poor schlubs who
the job to an (unlicensed, unregulated) for-profit contractor: a Virginia-based company called ID.me that already claims 64 million verified users in their database.
What could possibly go wrong?!?
ID.me says their technology isn’t any more intrusive than using your face to unlock your phone. They say they use one-to-one matching to spent days on hold using the same system to claim unemployment benefits in California or weeks to get them in New York.)
This won’t be the IRS’s first dance with outside ID verification. The credit-reporting company Equifax used to do it until the IRS suspended them after hackers breached their database and stole information on 143 million Americans. Bummer.
The legislators who write the tax laws don’t seem jazzed with the whole idea. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden — who proposed a new “Billionaire’s Income Tax” on fat cats with more than $1 billion in assets or $100 million in income — said, “I’m very disturbed that Americans may have to submit to a facial recognition system, wait on hold for hours, or both, to access personal data on the IRS website.” (Naturally, he said it in a tweet.) California Rep. Ted Lieu called it “a very, very bad idea” and said, “The IRS needs to reverse this Big Brother tactic, NOW.”
What do you think? Do you trust the IRS contractor with your biometric data? Even Facebook doesn’t ask for that, and their whole business is built around violating your privacy like last weekend’s nor’easter violated the Eastern Seaboard. Only time will tell if the new system makes life easier – or much, much harder!
