IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access

Re:IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access by ledauphin on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @12:55PM (#29997283)

I completely understand the frustration, and I think I agree that there likely aren't simple solutions. But can I ask - do you have any positive suggestions for what could be done differently that would lead to a better overall result? Is your assertion that it would be better to make it easier for both legitimate claims and fraudsters? What sort of legit/fraud claims ratio should we agree upon as a society, and is there any way for us to influence that number, or is this just an impossibly hard problem?

I know that's a lot of questions, but all of them are sincere. I'm legitimately unsure what I should think about this, as well as unsure what you would specifically propose.

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Re:IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access by jorvi on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @01:14PM (#29997630)

In general, for social services the fraudster problem is extremely overblown. Here in The Netherlands in 2016 we had 120-150 million euros of fraud on 77 billion euros of social service spending. That's less than 0.2%. Divided by the amount of social service recipients, it amounts to 17 euros of fraud per person.

https://www-rtlnieuws-nl.translate.goog/economie/column/4140...

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Re:IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access by ledauphin on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @01:22PM (#29997759)

If someone 'steals my identity' and gets my tax return money before I do, it could be quite a lot of work for me to prove to the IRS that it was stolen and that I should get the money. Which shifts the burden of dealing with identity theft onto legitimate claimants.

I wouldn't be surprised if this same thing could happen with social services, but I don't have much experience with the system.

In other words, I'm not sure if the overall problem we're trying to solve is simply "avoid waste" - it might be more like "prevent the average person from having their identity stolen and their time/money wasted". Which seems like a problem worth trying to solve even if the incidence is relatively low?

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Re:IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access by someguydave on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @02:49PM (#29999028)

Keeping the average business owner from being harassed by fake/false/dubious unemployment claims would also be good.

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Re:IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access by kansface on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @01:48PM (#29998177)

In California alone, at least 20 Billion dollars (over 10%) in pandemic relief funds were fraudulently given away. Quite a bit of it went to felons in jail! This is surely an underestimate. The Netherlands are not comparable to the US. Americans don't trust our institutions because by and large, they aren't trust worthy.

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Re:IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access by BitwiseFool on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @02:07PM (#29998463)

In absolute terms, 120-150 million Euros is still a vast sum of money. It's still worth trying to crack down on.

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Re:IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access by mistrial9 on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @12:58PM (#29997341)

thank you for asking, sorry for the rant-like structure. Whatever is to be done, needs to back off from "surveillance capitalism". In my own experience, failure in government programs is tolerated because everyone involved is on permanent salary.

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Re:IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access by ledauphin on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @01:18PM (#29997682)

having experienced some Kafka-esque systems myself, I understand the rant.

My presumably unreasonable imaginary proposal for these sorts of problems is that we would build off of real-life social networks. I think my mail carrier, for instance, would be able to verify that I am the same person who has lived at my address for the past N years.

Which really boils down to one human being seeing another human being's face. It's pretty low-tech.

That said, I feel like using video chats to do this is arguably a reasonable next-best alternative to IRL verification for people who for one reason or another can't ever meet their mail carrier.

I guess what I'm getting at is - it _seems_ like there could be a good version of this system that is roughly the right solution in a mostly unobjectionable, non-surveillance-state way. I don't really know what boxes it would have to check to move from the bad category into the good category. But I'd love to hear more from you or others on what options we might have.

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Re:IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access by landemva on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @11:19PM (#30004559)

While there would be a few edge cases when claiming UI after maybe a fire took out your house and files, 99% of the BS would end by creating UI account and login at time of new hire.

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