Comment by iostream24 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iostream24 | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, I’ve spent over a month trying to get verified as myself via ID.me and their broken process that can’t handle Americans living abroad, with foreign secondary documents. A typical round with customer service takes about a week, and then I was told that someone will be able to verify electric bills that aren’t in English, but then that turned out to be weeks ago and it’s yet to happen. This is all merely to set the stage for being ELIGIBLE for a human to do a video conference verification with me, which they hopefully will deign to do.

A singular corporation (ID.me) holds every American’s ability to login to their government tax profile hostage, and we pay them for the pleasure of this rotten monopoly and abuse of public trust. I just want to pay my taxes, sigh. It should be as easy as any other bill or process. Making taxpayers suffer more does not generate extra revenue for the state. There is literally no call nor need for all this extra stressful nonsense making people sweat every April. It’s actually counterproductive to fund raising for state activities. Bureaucracy steals lives and health for wasteful ends that do not benefit the group. The likelihood of reforming our deliberately and absurdly arcane tax system is about as high as large corps and oligarchs paying their fair share, nevertheless we should insist.

That said, I’m cautiously optimistic about this excellent announcement to reduce future peoples suffering.

I also gladly submitted biometric video scans and it still wasn’t good enough for ID.me So, I wonder if I’ll still be trying to get verified by the time this new system rolls out…

I cannot upvote this comment enough!

I'm an American abroad and I spent roughly 8 hours spread across 5 days getting access to my irs.gov account. And yes, I actually recorded time spent on this chore.

The worst part was not the facial recognition. It was the fact that I had an address outside of the USA and they would not recognize a non-USA utility company for address verification. This was stupid for two reasons. The first being the obvious requirement that a non-resident have a contract with a utility company in the USA, and the second being that the IRS has been mailing me at my non-USA address for years. The IRS already had my address, but I had to verify it with ID.me.

The other worst part was they never told me WHY my various utility bills and bank statements were being rejected. At one point they told me I had to translate a bank statement, and that was the most feedback I ever got. But then I translated it and they rejected it for an unknown reason.

I eventually got my registration through them by getting a USA bank to recognize my foreign address. Luckily I also had an old W-2 laying around from years ago when I briefly worked in the states. Do they expect my current employer to give me a W-2?

Finally, on their stupid video call I was told I needed to have all of this documentation, which I dutifully prepared, and then all the person cared about was me holding my passport up to the camera.

Completely broken process for Americans abroad. To the point where they're likely breaking some US law by making it so difficult for non-residents to register for IRS access.

I hated it and I hope ID.me dies in a pit of bankruptcy.

Same here. I hate ID.me and their piece of crap system. Never managed to get it working after wasting so much time. Luckily, I don't _need it_, so at the end I just gave up and used different methods. Would hate it if I'm actually unemployed and had to use that terrible firm.

I set up ID.me for somebody and at one step it asked me to confirm the proper spelling of their name.

Both options were incorrectly spelled. There was no way to proceed and spell the name correctly.

Their support desk basically told us it wasn't their fault and to go away.

I've not been able to get my credit report because of something incorrect in my credit report that they were asking me to verify...

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