During tax season, my accountant erroneously estimated what I would owe to the US Government for filing. I ended up overpaying based on the estimate. Once filed, I owed nothing and was getting a refund. In previous years when this has happened, the IRS mails me a check for the overpaid amount. This year, however, they have a new process in place. I suppose it’s to help prevent fraud because most of it is about identify verification. While some parts of the process felt somewhat adapted for a digital environment, other parts felt really disjointed and unnecessarily clunky.
The process, as near as I can determine, went something like this.
- I received a letter in the mail (i.e., snail mail).
- The letter instructed me to log in to the IRS portal to verify my identify and refund amount.
- For communicating online, I needed the 2024 and 2025 filings, along with the letter.
- When I tried logging in, it redirected me to a different service called ID Me. I had to create a new login.
- This login allowed me to somehow access both the ID ME service and the IRS. It seems ID Me is a 3rd party service to verify identities on behalf of the IRS.
- I logged into ID ME to submit photos of documents to verify identify, all different from the ones indicated on the IRS letter. I needed government-issue photo ID, secondary ID to confirm my address (e.g., utility or phone bill), and my social security card. For any non-Americans reading this, my original social insurance card is a card-sized rectangle of thick paper.
- I logged in with my laptop. ID Me seamlessly sent a prompt to my phone to photo documents and upload them.
- Once uploaded, ID Me routed me back to my laptop to complete the verification process, i.e., waiting for a video call with an agent to physically view my ids.
- After verifying with the agent via video call, I then had to log back into IRS. Again through the ID Me login.
- Then I had to select some options to allow information sharing between IRS and ID Me.
Hopefully I did all that correctly. I won’t know right away because it will take several weeks to receive the refund check via snail mail. And yes, it was as confusing to navigate as it sounds.