Commentary
Building 40 aircraft carriers. Constructing 80,000 miles of border wall. Rebuilding a devastated North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene—nine times over.
Regardless of party, most Americans agree that our government can and should use taxpayer dollars more efficiently. But they still might be shocked at the sheer scale of what we simply lose to fraud, let alone at how much worse the problem could get without decisive action from the incoming administration.
Federal agencies lost between $233 billion and $521 billion to fraud each year from 2018 to 2022. This staggering sum represents 3 percent to 7 percent of annual federal spending over that period, enough to fund one of the programs listed above every year.
Shockingly, that fraud estimate doesn’t include federal funds lost at the state level.
Behind much of these losses are identity thieves, who use their victims’ personal information to steal benefits like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) aid, small-business loans, and other federal resources intended for Americans in need.
The problem exploded as more government services went digital during the COVID-19 pandemic. Generative artificial intelligence tools repurposed for scams and deepfakes are making it worse.
It’s not just the cost to taxpayers that’s troubling. The human toll of identity theft is devastating. In 2022, 16 percent of identity theft victims contemplated suicide. As a veteran, I’m also concerned with how military members are especially likely to be victims of identity theft. That’s one reason I founded ID.me, now the nation’s largest secure digital identity wallet, to keep Americans and funds safe.
Today, we’re seeing fraudsters use increasingly sophisticated AI tools. In 2023, their attempts to bypass remote identity verification using deepfake-driven “face swaps” rose by 704 percent. Meanwhile, generative AI is helping fraudsters manipulate people into divulging personal information at an unprecedented scale.
We have reached a pivotal moment in the fight against fraud. On one side, fraudsters are evolving their methods through advanced techniques. On the other, the incoming Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was created to eliminate hundreds of billions in waste, fraud, and abuse. President-elect Donald Trump says he is committed to fully eliminating the “massive” issue of fraud and improper payments in order to save the U.S. trillions of dollars.
The creation of DOGE is a great first step. To achieve its goals of combating fraud, federal agencies must make identity verification more secure for Americans who access government services online.
DOGE should work with the Office of Management and Budget and with Congress to immediately prioritize broader use of shared services for login and identity verification to grant users access to online applications. Shared services work across multiple agencies. They reduce agency costs and the burden on consumers of verifying multiple times with different agencies.
It should also:
- Adopt, at minimum, the rigorous guidelines for identity verification set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology for high-risk transactions involving benefits programs such as SNAP, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance.
- Deploy advanced fraud controls such as biometrics to compare individuals to the documents they submit in the verification process, identify the use of deepfakes, and ensure one individual isn’t registering multiple identities. Use only solutions that are tested and demonstrate consistent performance across demographic groups.
- Test for the presence of a live individual during verification, known as Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) or “liveness detection.” PAD can reveal whether a video or selfie shows a real person rather than a deepfake.
- Test and implement emerging technologies that can detect deepfakes, virtual cameras, or other GenAI-related technologies fraudsters use.
- Prevent scalable attacks by serial identity thieves via the use of identity resolution and duplicate evidence detection. These techniques can detect when a fraudster is duplicating someone’s documents to make a fake identity.
- End the use of Knowledge Based Verification. National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines note that KBV, which often takes the form of “security questions” based on data aggregated by data brokers (e.g., “Where did you meet your spouse?”), is highly vulnerable to social engineering.
- Leverage private-sector identity-verification technologies. Private-sector innovation and competition have resulted in the most effective solutions available. These technologies can evolve much more rapidly than government-built solutions to stay ahead of professional fraudsters.
- Fund fraud investigation efforts to recover stolen funds and deter attacks. International groups attacking Americans should face more severe consequences.
Now is the time for decisive action to stem our losses to fraud and put Americans back in control of their identities.
Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
