Government services login schemes at loggerheads
Government departments are reportedly fighting over the systems people will use to sign in to public services
service provider in the UK government is HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), which uses an old Government Gateway access system boasting 50 million accounts for services such as tax returns.
However, next year Gateway is scheduled to be taken out of service and replaced by Verify, which is being pushed by the Cabinet Office as a master key ID system for consumers using all public services.
There have been rumblings for months that HMRC lacked confidence in the system and wanted to develop an alternative based on Gateway, and its intentions were finally, if briefly, made clear in a blog post published in February. “HMRC is developing its own identity solution for individuals, businesses and agents. Other departments will use GOV.UK Verify for all individual citizen services,” read the blog.
However, the government has set a target for getting 25 million users onto Verify by 2020, and would meet that target easily if HMRC accounts were migrated to Verify. This perhaps explains this swift volte-face from HMRC, which quickly edited the blog.
“HMRC is committed to Verify as the single identification service for individuals and is fully focused on delivering this,” the blog backtracked. “The authentication service that HMRC is developing to replace the Government Gateway will complement the existing Verify service for business representatives.”
One of the reasons that HMRC may be lukewarm on Verify is its poor usability. According to the service dashboard for GOV.UK, the proportion of “visits started on Verify that result in successfully accessing a service” is incredibly low. A mere 34% of visitors were able to access the site successfully, with the (unnamed) highest-performing service managing only 67% of successful logins.