INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightCreative Commons/Annelieke BImage caption
The government will stop funding Verify next year
The National Audit Office (NAO) has criticised the government's flagship identity verification scheme.A damning report says Gov.UK Verify
has fallen well short of its target of 25 million users by 2020, managing only 3.6 million so far.The government has had to lower its
estimates for Verify's financial benefits by 75%.It says challenges like these are to be expected when the government is working "at the
forefront of new technology".The Verify platform was launched by the Government Digital Service (GDS) in 2016, intended to become the
default way for people to prove their identity for online government services.From checking income tax to receiving benefit payments, GDS's
aim was for Verify to be a shared identity portal across government departments - with 46 expected to be connected to the platform by March
2018.But only 19 government services currently use Verify and 11 of those can still be accessed using other online systems
For those that do use Verify, problems are widespread
Currently only 48% of people who try to sign up for the service are successful on their first try
This rate is even lower (38%) for universal credit claimants using the service to authenticate their identity online
This has led to increased operational costs, with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) expecting its spend on manual verification to
TheIndianSubcontinent News
"The NAO report reflects that it has been a challenging project - but challenges like these are to be expected when the government is
working at the forefront of new technology.""Management failure"But Meg Hillier MP, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, called Verify
people that try to sign up are able to use it and take-up is much lower than expected."The report notes that the total cost of Verify is in
Of the known costs, more than one-third has gone on payments to the commercial identity providers behind the system, including Barclays and
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Fewer than half of people that try to sign up for the service are successful on their first
try
The government is due to stop funding Verify from April 2020, handing operation over to the private sector
"It is not yet clear what it will cost for government departments to continue using Verify when government funding stops next year," said Ms
And even this revised figure is in doubt, as the NAO says it has been unable to verify the estimated benefits
"Even in the context of GDS's redefined objectives for the programme, it is difficult to conclude that successive decisions to continue with
Verify have been sufficiently justified," the report says.Analysis: Rory Cellan-Jones, TheIndianSubcontinent technology correspondent A
whole new way of doing major government IT programmes much more efficiently - that was the promise of GDS.Instead, its biggest project,
Verify, has turned out to be the same old story of delays, technical failures and missed targets - or, as the NAO puts it, the "optimism
bias and a failure to set clear objectives" we've seen so many times before.I got a warning of that back in 2014 when I was invited in to
the Cabinet Office to be one of the first people to try out Verify
The GDS team painted a compelling vision of a system that would give citizens a simple way of accessing online services provided by an
increasingly digital government.But despite their best efforts, when they tried to verify me, the computer said, "No."Teething troubles that
will soon be sorted out, I thought
But, five years on, fewer than half of the people who try to sign up succeed even after they've had their identity confirmed by one of
Verify's commercial partners.Many of the big government departments were hostile to GDS from the start, seeing it as a threat to their right
to run their own IT projects
Perhaps that's one of the reasons why just 19 departments have signed up to use it, when 46 were supposed to have come on board by now
The most startling fact in the report is that six government bodies that are using Verify have failed to pay their bills for it, even after
being invoiced by the Cabinet Office.The government will end central funding for Verify next year and it is clear it has only been kept
afloat for so long because of the role it was supposed to play in the provision of universal credit.Another fine mess then - and as far as
finding a way to run major public sector IT projects, it is back to the drawing board
