I’ve been having to log in to the IRS tax transcript website a bunch recently. They started giving a notice they were moving to use ID.me as their identity platform (BTW, it appears Social Security and other Federal programs are doing the same). Users needed to move from original IRS user logins to ID.me by summer 2022.
While trying to login to the IRS site today I kept getting technical web server errors after entering my password. On the chance they’d movied on to ID.me early, I decided to try that instead – knowing I was going to have to sign up soon anyway. It worked with ID.me and I learned something not obvious in the process, which may help you.
One may sign in to ID.me by linking your Facebook, Google or LinkedIn identities. Hah! No way I’m getting financial stuff commingled with those platforms. So I signed up for a native ID.me account.
The ID.me sign up process is pretty exhaustive/ intrusive – you need to supply:
- License or Passport photos
- SSN
- Email address
- Phone # for text capability (and they say no Google Voice or VOiP numbers)
and then allow a live biometric scan/video of your face for matching to the above supplied photo. They compare all this with various online databases to confirm your identity. In my case, they identified two options for my name and had me select the correct legal form. So it’s pretty robust.
They require 2FA (two-factor authentication) and one may chose from a variety of means: texting a one time code, physical security keys like YubiKey, etc. – one of them is using a code generator app. I selected that option and they wanted me to download their own app. Not up for more app storage on my phone and adding another security risk vector, I wondered if I could use Google Authenticator (GA) instead – even if it wasn’t mentioned.
Further down on the page was a button to reveal the authenticator code. When shown, that looked just like all the other QR codes I’d used to enroll sites. So I scanned that within my GA app and bam! A new site/ identity was created in GA for ID.me. (ID.me also provided a backup emergency code for access should you have trouble – put that in a safe place should GA not work.)
ID.me sent several texts and emails along the way to confirm various stages of the process or inform of actions taken. Comforting. In one message, ID.me correctly determined I was on a Linux platform while signing up. All worked just fine as such.
Back with our great pals at the IRS site, I now tried logging in using ID.me – when prompted, I input the code from my Google Authenticator and was in! And no website errors!*
So, long story short, you don’t need the ID.me authenticator app if you already have Google Authenticator or another compliant tool.
*BTW, I tried again with my old dedicated IRS login and the website errors resumed. So there are two very separate paths into the site and ID.me is the only one working today.