Jared Serbu reports:
The Internal Revenue Service has notified a relative handful of contractors that it plans to spend nearly $130 million to build its own new suite of identity verification services, an approach that appears to significantly diverge from an established governmentwide program to verify users’ identities.
The agency issued a request for quotations on April 30, just weeks before officials announced that their existing identity safeguards had been breached by a criminal syndicate that stole detailed tax transcripts on 104,000 taxpayers. The IRS published details of the procurement via the General Services Administration’s eBuy platform, which is only visible to existing GSA schedule contractors and lets the government choose which vendors to notify about a particular solicitation.
[…]
“What I’ve found maddening in the wake of this breach has been the IRS’ assumption, in every statement, that the only way to solve this problem is to create their own in-house identity system,” said Jeremy Grant, who until April led the NSTIC program at NIST and now is an independent technology consultant. “IRS already did this once, using KBA in a way that directly conflicted with best practices for electronic authentication and with solutions that had not been certified for government use. The results of that experiment have been on display in the news.
Read more on Federal News Radio.