Somehow unsure your gov’t agency needs ID verification? New tool might convince you

An obscure financial management program for U.S. federal agencies has created a digital tool to convince government officials to use identity verification software in a bid to combat fraudsters.

Too esoteric? A non-profit wants to give government policymakers and operations people hands-on experience with identity management software and hardware.

The Joint Financial Management and Improvement Program‘s reason for being is to get every last corner of the federal government to end ineffectual money management practices and policies.

Officials with the Government Services Administration have created the tool as part of a report about payment integrity and the inability of the government to be sure of a citizen’s identity.

The GSA emphasizes its point, saying improper government payments totaled $281 billion in fiscal 2021, a $75 billion jump over 2020. This is another preliminary estimate of fraud that attacked the government’s Covid relief funds.

Program administrators researched other efforts to improve ID verification and talked with industry experts to come up with the report, which argues that bureaucrats need to “consider and evaluate additional potential options or practices to address identity misrepresentation.”

It is interesting to note that “biometric” is mentioned 13 times in the 84-page document. Detailed and lengthy as it is, the report is more aimed at policy and strategy.

The tool, called the ID verification controls simulator, gives users a hypothetical government program and input options to see hypothetical results. Being a fiction, the simulator cannot be used to find likely outcomes of actual program actions.

Among the actions a user can choose is forming data-sharing partnerships with federal and state agencies. Data can be as basic as letting everyone known that a given identity or account should not be paid benefits.

Another is to secure and encrypt the data of someone applying for a government benefit. A couple levels up in terms of abstraction, one choice is whether to introduce risk-based transaction management for internal control in response to benefit applications.

Meanwhile, the Advanced Technology Academic Research Center has created a pair of public/private ID-management labs for decisionmakers, according to FedScoop

The Digital Mobile Credentials Lab has six use cases involving devices as identifiers. The Identity Management Working Group Lab invites ID management vendors to show the promise of a Derived Fast ID Online 2 credential.

Article Topics

biometric payments  |  biometrics  |  data privacy  |  data sharing  |  digital identity  |  fraud prevention  |  GAO (Government Accountability Office)  |  identity verification  |  secure transactions  |  U.S. Government