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

Re:A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers al... by woodruffw on Friday February 10, 2023 @01:08AM (#34736228)
> Or maybe the quote is wrong that it "hasn't been widely rolled out"?

I think it's wrong in some senses: Login.gov has been rolled out to the SSA, OSHA, Treasury, RRB, VA, DHS, and quite a few other orgs and agencies. There's no one good metric for these things, but if you measure it by org/agency size and/or budget, Login.gov looks very good.

I agree that $187 million is an eye-popping number, and I wish we had the ability to put it into context: it's entirely possible that $187 million spent means that each agency is saving $X million in separate/legacy maintenance each year.

Edit: Another framing is that, if the GSA's user predictions are correct[1], Login.gov will end up costing a little under $2 USD per user.

[1]: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/it-modernization/2022/06/gsa-...

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Re:A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers al... by jrochkind1 on Friday February 10, 2023 @10:47AM (#34741183)
For me, it's not a question of whether the cost is "worth it", but that the cost seems very very high for what seems to have been produced.
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Re:A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers al... by savanaly on Friday February 10, 2023 @12:00PM (#34742345)
Agree with jrochkind1 that it doesn't matter whether it's worth it or not. I suppose chairs and desks for all US Government employees pay for their cost 1000x over, but I would hope people would still not let their costs balloon to more than, say, 2x what they "should" cost by some common-sense metric.
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Re:A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers al... by woodruffw on Friday February 10, 2023 @12:25PM (#34742712)
Sure, but what's the common-sense metric here?

As posted elsewhere in the thread: this is ~$40m/year for an IdP/login scheme for the entire USG (and, increasingly, state and local governments). That's significantly less than the engineering talent at companies like Okta and Authy probably cost each year, even before factoring in overhead and non-engineering roles.

All things considered, this looks like a very efficient use of taxpayer money to me. Particularly since it seems to have been primarily paid for on GS pay grades, not with private contractors.

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