Enlarge / House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) is seen during a hearing in March 2022 in Washington, DC. (credit: Alex Wong / Staff | Getty Images News )

Online verification through ID.me was supposed to help the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) prevent widespread fraud while rushing unemployment benefits to those who needed it most during the pandemic.

Instead, wait times to get verified for some stretched up to 10 hours, and in one case in California, actually took three days . A six-month investigation by the House Oversight Committee found evidence that ID.me “downplayed excessive wait times,” hiding the problem from federal and state agencies by only providing data related to successful connections, Politico reported . This likely kept aid out of reach for those most in need, whose technology access was not reliable enough to stay connected through substantially delayed wait times.

In a statement, chairwoman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), described the evidence revealed by the investigation as “appalling.” The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis chairman, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), expressed disappointment that ID.me did not deliver as a partner in US efforts to quickly disburse aid.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

When the US government began offering financial aid to Americans struggling to cope with a pandemic-fueled economic collapse in 2020, the Department of Treasury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation urged Americans to be ever more vigilant about their personal information. COVID-19 scams seemed to be everywhere, and for government agencies, it became difficult to ensure that all the money it was sending out actually made it to the citizens most in need of aid—and not into the hands of bad actors.

It’s now estimated that hundreds of billions in COVID relief funds were stolen, Bloomberg reported , with no way of knowing the true cost of the losses.

It has perhaps never been clearer to the federal government how impactful it could be during times of emergency to already have trusted nationwide digital identification verification systems in place.