ID.me

Type: Digital identity wallet and remote identity-proofing provider.
Founded: 2010, McLean, Virginia, by Blake Hall and Matthew Thompson.
Pandemic role: State and federal identity-proofing vendor for unemployment, tax, and benefits portals; not a lender and not a benefits decision-maker.
Current status: Private identity company; its 2025 financing and user figures are company announcements.

In the archive

Case: Kengne v. ID.me, Inc. — N.D. Ga., No. 1:22-cv-02237-SEG
Article: Pondera's 1.1 Million Flags
Article: Blake Hall and ID.me's California Contract

Pandemic-role map

Reader shorthand: public-benefits identity gatekeeper.
What ID.me did for claimants: gave unemployment and tax-benefit applicants a remote identity-proofing path using document upload, selfie/face match, and a trusted-referee video process when automated checks failed.
What ID.me sold to government: reusable identity verification, account login, fraud screening, and help-desk/referee workflows for agencies that needed to know whether a claimant was a real eligible person.
Where responsibility sat: state workforce agencies, IRS, and other government agencies made program decisions; ID.me verified identity and controlled one of the gates into the application or account workflow.
Pandemic-relief tension: the vendor and its clients credit it with stopping fraud; House Oversight findings and a 2025 GAO report record long waits, access friction and oversight questions.

Before the pandemic

ID.me began as a digital identity company serving groups such as military members, students, first responders, and nurses for eligibility-based online discounts. That reusable-wallet model later became useful to government agencies because the same person could verify once and use the credential across multiple sites.

When COVID hit, unemployment insurance agencies faced identity theft, synthetic-identity claims, and stolen-identity PUA filings.

During the pandemic

By the Committees' count ID.me contracted with at least 25 state agencies, for nearly $45 million, to verify claimants remotely. ID.me's own table of its government contracts, from its April 28, 2022 response to the Committees, lists contract ceilings rather than payments. ID.me told the Committees that "government partners pay ID.me only when a user successfully verifies their identity with ID.me or logs in with an existing or newly-issued credential." The three largest ceilings were $86,508,159.90 for the IRS, $42,001,508 for the Department of Veterans Affairs and $23,282,162.72 for California's Employment Development Department, where 5,956,703 users had supplied biometric data (ID.me's Contracts Servicing Government Partners; ID.me's letter of April 28, 2022). The vendor's Arizona case study claimed large fraud reductions; those are vendor/client figures absent an independent audit.

California's EDD fraud-tools assessment credits ID.me with reducing fraud and speeding some identity checks while showing the state was already running other tools, including Thomson Reuters/Pondera.

EDD's later assessments give the verification funnel. From January 1 to November 30, 2023, 692,944 unemployment claimants started ID.me verification: 478,076 were verified, 161,044 were unsuccessful, 50,678 abandoned and 3,146 were still processing (Fraud Tools Assessment, 2023). From January 1 to September 30, 2024, 1,005,984 of 1,152,943 were verified, 72,707 were unsuccessful and 67,224 abandoned; the table does not place the other 7,028 (Fraud Tools Assessment, annual report 2025). The 2025 assessment says its "fraud prevented" count, 7,028 people in 2024, comes from monitoring by ID.me's own security and data analytics teams; the 2023 assessment's count was 78,247.

California has since moved its first identity check to another vendor. EDD chose Socure after comparing four vendors in 2023 and finalized the procurement in December 2023; its reason was that claimants would verify inside EDD's own portal instead of leaving for ID.me's site, where some abandoned the attempt. EDD says it began rolling Socure out to unemployment claimants in August 2025 and now uses ID.me as "a secondary verification option" when more review is needed. By EDD's count Socure completed more than 200,000 verifications in its first months and verified about 80 percent of customers "within seconds" (EDD, March 5, 2026).

The access record. On November 17, 2022, House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney and Select Subcommittee Chair James Clyburn released findings that ID.me directed 10–15% of applicants (the share its automated face match could not clear) to prove identity by video chat with ID.me staff, and that in April 2021 average video wait times ran four hours or more in 14 of 21 states ID.me served, nearly 10 hours in North Dakota and about 6 in Washington. The release said ID.me had removed the ability to schedule appointments because it determined they were "hindering efficiency," and that the company told the IRS in an April 2021 meeting its wait times were "about 2 hours as of today" while its own data showed the four-hour-plus figure, as the IRS weighed an ID.me contract for advance Child Tax Credit payments. The Committees also reported that ID.me could supply no methodology for CEO Blake Hall's June 2021 public claim that "America has lost more than $400 billion to fraudulent claims," nearly ten times the $45.7 billion in potential unemployment fraud that the Committees' release attributed to the Department of Labor Office of Inspector General's data analysis.

The facial-recognition record. On May 18, 2022, Senators Wyden, Markey, Padilla, and Booker asked the FTC to investigate ID.me for deceptive statements under Section 5. ID.me's blog posts and white papers had stated it did not use one-to-many facial recognition (comparing a face against a database), and on January 24, 2022 Hall reiterated that ID.me "does not use 1:many facial recognition," calling it "problematic." Two days later he reversed in a LinkedIn post admitting the company did use it, and ID.me edited the prior posts. The senators argued the false denial may have misled both consumers and the state and federal officials choosing a vendor. The IRS announced on February 7, 2022 that it would drop required facial recognition for taxpayer accounts after the public backlash.

GAO's June 11, 2025 report found that ID.me is the IRS's only provider of the identity proofing the IRS requires for certain online applications, which users accessed more than 150 million times from 2021 through 2024. It also found that the IRS had set no measurable goals for the program and had not listed ID.me's artificial-intelligence tools in its AI inventory. The IRS agreed with all four of GAO's recommendations. As of September 27, 2026, GAO shows the AI-inventory recommendation closed as implemented in September 2025 and the other three open. GAO lists the IRS's planned dates as July 2026 for goals and October 2026 for procedures to share vendor performance data (GAO-25-107273).

The IRS has since signed a new blanket purchase agreement with ID.me, LLC, dated December 29, 2025 and running to December 29, 2030; USAspending records it as awarded after full and open competition, with one offer (award record). The IRS order for calendar 2026 is $65,000,000 (order 2032L226F00012), and six orders under the agreement came to $93,025,895.96 by late September 2026 (order totals).

After the pandemic

ID.me's case, in its September 3, 2025 financing release, is a mission "to expand access to secure, reusable digital identity and to stop AI-driven fraud" (ID.me $340 million financing release). The countervailing record is in two documents: the House Committees' findings on wait times and on what the company told the IRS, and the senators' letter on its facial-recognition statements; they are allegations and congressional findings, not adjudications.

On September 15, 2026 ID.me and Plaid announced a partnership under which ID.me would verify the person and Plaid the bank account before an agency releases a benefit payment (announcement). It names no agency using the service. Blake Hall's description is conditional: agencies "would be able to confirm the account belongs to the verified person before a dollar moves."

Source notes

Primary documents in this archive

House Oversight / Select Subcommittee, "Chairs Maloney, Clyburn Release Evidence Facial Recognition Company ID.me Downplayed Excessive Wait Times…" (Nov. 17, 2022), full text: HOUSE OVERSIGHT Maloney Clyburn ID.me findings staff release 2022-11-17
Sens. Wyden, Markey, Padilla, Booker letter to FTC Chair Khan urging investigation of ID.me for deceptive facial-recognition statements (May 18, 2022), full text: SENATORS Wyden Booker Markey Padilla letter to FTC re ID.me deceptive statements 2022-05-18

External references

House Oversight Democrats, ID.me evidence release: House Oversight 2022 11 17 Idme Findings (original: oversightdemocrats.house.gov · stored capture)
Wyden press release on the FTC referral: Wyden Colleagues Urge FTC To Investigate Idme For Deceptive Statements 24b24383c43491f1 (original: wyden.senate.gov · stored capture)
GAO, "Taxpayer Identity Verification: IRS Should Strengthen Oversight of Its Identity-Proofing Program" (2025): GAO-25-107273, Taxpayer Identity Verification: IRS Should Strengthen Oversight of Its Identity-Proofing Program (report page with recommendation status, retrieved September 27, 2026) (original: gao.gov · stored capture)
California EDD Fraud Tools Assessment: Fraud Tools Assessment Pdf 5781A053Aa253C0C (original: edd.ca.gov · stored capture)
ID.me Arizona PUA case study: ID.me case study: Arizona Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (original: network.id.me · stored capture)
ID.me 2025 financing announcement: ID.me $340M at >$2B valuation Sept 2025 (original: network.id.me · stored capture)

Contracts, assessments and later records