IRS facial recognition plan gets fierce blowback from bipartisan senators

Nothing brings Democrats and Republicans together like the horrifying notion of government agencies accessing our biometric data.

In the wake of a controversial plan by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to implement third-party services that rely on facial recognition, bipartisan senators on Thursday demanded that the IRS “immediately discontinue” any programs that collect, process, or store the biometric data of American taxpayers.

Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri wrote in a letter to Commissioner Charles P. Rettig that the IRS has a “poor track record of protecting taxpayer data” and that facial recognition technology, in particular, poses deep concerns around privacy and security—with verification systems more likely to misidentify women and people of color, for instance.

Online services from the IRS rely on a Virginia-based private company called ID.me, which requires visitors to take a live video selfie and then matches it against an official document, such as a driver’s license or a passport. Last month, it was revealed that all taxpayers who log in to IRS services will be required to go through ID.me by this summer, meaning old logins will no longer work. The plan has raised alarm bells among privacy advocates and civil rights groups, with the ACLU calling it “deeply troubling.”

In their letter, Merkley and Blunt point out that the system would be at best burdensome and at worst impossible to use, especially for taxpayers who don’t have the equipment or technical knowhow to comply. “While taxpayers should never be driven to a laborious third-party process to access fundamental government services, this is especially true for IRS.gov, which was one of the federal government’s most highly trafficked websites in 2021,” the senators wrote.

Reached for comment by Fast Company, a spokesperson for ID.me said the data ID.me stores is encrypted in a way that only it can access. “ID.me does not share biometric data with the IRS, or any government agency, absent the receipt of a subpoena, or as part of an investigation into an identity theft or fraud case only at the specific agency where the ID.me account was involved,” the company said.

The senators are asking for a response from the IRS by the end of this month.