Last year, in an attempt to address the growing problem of fraud targeting taxpayers, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) signed a two-year, $86 million contract with identity verification company ID.me to provide facial recognition services for users accessing IRS services online.
However, by January, the IRS’s implementation of ID.me’s solution received widespread criticism from advocacy groups and bi-partisan legislators who maintained that forcing taxpayers to provide biometric data was an invasion of privacy.