The head of the General Services Administration re-affirmed Tuesday the stance of senior tech leaders at her agency who said they aren’t yet ready to introduce facial recognition as a method for identity verification for federal services — but they may be one day.
Robin Carnahan said during an interview for FedScoop’s IT Mod Talks that the federal government must do a better job with its identity verification to make sure people who need services can get them and others who don’t can’t obtain them fraudulently, which has been a major issue with pandemic relief benefits.
“If we have an identity verification service, it makes sure that people who we want to provide services to get those fast,” Carnahan said when asked about Login.gov, GSA’s governmentwide secure identity verification platform. “And it also prevents fraudsters from scamming the system. Both problems we saw over and over again throughout the pandemic where people who legitimately qualified for a service weren’t able to get it and had long backlogs and people who should not have gotten it did because they were able to scam the system. And identity verification was sort of a core to each of those things.”
But as the government looks to solve these issues, it must do so in a smart way that “maintains and upholds our basic principles” with security,…
