IRS Retreats From Facial Recognition to Verify Taxpayers’ Identities - WSJ

The Internal Revenue Service is scrapping its use of a private facial-recognition system to authenticate taxpayers’ identities for online accounts, the agency said Monday after criticism from lawmakers in both parties over privacy concerns.

Too late for parents who wanted to avoid a massive tax bill and had to use facial recognition to opt out of Congressionally mandated advanced child tax credit payments.

And last year, federal authorities said they would investigate after the news organization ProPublica released the tax information of several wealthy Americans. The potential breach raised questions about whether there were gaps in IRS data systems. The agency hasn’t provided any detail on what happened and investigations have yet to yield prosecutions or any publicly available reports.

That announcement was in June 2021. What’s taking so long?