📚 ID.me Lied About Its Facial Recognition Tech, Congress Says

The controversial facial recognition firm hired by the US government during the height of the pandemic is being slammed by members of Congress, who say the company misrepresented how its technology works and downplayed excessive wait times which stopped Americans from collecting unemployment benefits. From a report: New evidence shows that ID.me "inaccurately overstated its capacity to conduct identity verification services to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and made baseless claims about the amount of federal funds lost to pandemic fraud in an apparent attempt to increase demand for its identity verification services," according to a new report from the two U.S. House of Representatives committees overseeing the government's COVID-19 response. The report also said that ID.me -- which received $45 million in COVID relief funds from at least 25 state agencies -- misrepresented the excessively long wait times it forced on people trying to claim emergency benefits like unemployment insurance and Child Tax Credit payments. Wait times for video chats were as long as 4 to 9 hours in some states. Members of Congress also wrote that ID.me provided no evidence to support a claim that unemployment fraud had cost US taxpayers $400 billion.

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