The IRS and face-scanning

According to a story from the Washington Post which eventually found its way into the Kansas City Star, you will soon have to scan your face to access the Internal Revenue Service’s tax accounts.

So if you want to look up details about your taxes – like child tax credits, payment plans or if anyone at the IRS has finally caught on to the bullshit you’ve been pulling with that secret bank account in the Cayman Islands – first you’ll need to record a video of your face with your smartphone or computer and send it to a private contractor called ID.me.

Which might be problematic.

Google “how many Americans own smartphones” and you’ll be directed to a Pew Research Center article from April of 2021 that says 97% of Americans have a cell phone of some kind and 85% have a smartphone and if you break it down even further, if you’re over 65, only 61% have a smartphone, so do the math and 39% of Americans over 65 have yet to go out and buy a smartphone because their grandkids are still explaining how to set the clock on their VCR.

And according to statista.com, in 2020 only 87% of Americans have access to a computer in their households which really makes me wonder what’s the difference between a “house” and “household” and I just looked that up and a “household” includes everybody that lives in your house including your servants, an explanation that was provided by Richie Rich, a really lame comic book character based on the early life of Donald Trump.

But I digress as I so often do.

Let’s just say about 13% of Americans – which comes out to approximately 42.8 million people – are going to have difficulty meeting the new IRS requirements because they have no easy way to record a video, but it’s their own fault because they’re too busy listening to 78s on their Victrolas and driving their flivvers to speakeasys to catch up with the 21st Century and buy a $799 iPhone.

(And if you don’t know what 78s, Victrolas, flivvers and speakeasys are, find someone who looks old enough to die before Friday and ask them.)

True story

When smartphones became a thing someone at the Star had the brilliant idea that I could record really, really crappy looking videos while covering the Royals and they could use them on the Star’s website and I didn’t want to do that because it was a pain in the ass and the videos would look amateurish and it would be just one more thing players didn’t want to do and would help screw up my relationships with them, so I started carrying around an old flip phone and whenever someone at the Star made some smartphone-related request, I’d take out the old flip phone and say I couldn’t because my phone didn’t do that stuff, but if they still wanted me to do whatever lame project they had in mind, they could always buy me an iPhone.

A plan I revealed to Royals pitcher Peter Moylan (and if Peter’s any indication, everybody from Australia is hysterically funny) and Peter told me I was a genius and it turns out that’s just the kind of brilliant thinking that eventually gets you fired.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=487780992623074

BTW: If you want to hear Peter be hilarious about baseball, check out his Farm to Fame podcast and if you click on the link above you can hear him explain why the players are locked out and if you’re over 65 ask one of your grandkids how to do all that and if you don’t have grandkids, clearly someone in your immediate family needs to “get busy” because Life is only going to get more complicated and just a few years from now you’ll need those grandkids to explain the settings on your brand new Time Machine.

And now back to the IRS

In our last thrilling chapter of Stupid Plans Created by Bureaucrats With Nothing Better To Do, you were going to be required to scan your face and send that to a private contractor called ID.me which scares the living crap out of people who pay attention to this kind of thing because it turns out there is no federal law regulating how the information can be used or shared.

So you give ID.me a scan of your face and then ID.me can do pretty much anything they want with it and what could possibly go wrong with that plan?

And on top of everything else, the ID.me system has problems.

People who have tried to use it have reported glitches and hours-long delays and once again the people who actually pay attention to this kind of stuff say ID.me has overstated the abilities of face-scanning technology which could wrongly identify people as being frauds and if that happens you’re completely screwed and might as well go off the grid completely and live in compound somewhere in Idaho until the Race Wars start and Jesus comes back to put White Christians in charge of All Mankind which would be kind of odd because I’m pretty sure He’s Jewish.

I mean, why do Christians think Jesus is happy with them because if you look at what He said and what Christians do, when Jesus comes back I’m thinking he’s going to be really pissed off and maybe Christians shouldn’t be looking forward to that reunion.

Anyway…

Once again it turns out there’s no federal laws governing how facial recognition should work nationwide so it’s pretty much a Lord of the Flies situation and cats will marry dogs and rivers will turn to blood and we’ll all wish we had one of those Time Machines I mentioned previously so we could go back to the 1950s unless you’re Black because the Good Ol’ Days weren’t all that good for people with the wrong color skin.

Also…

If the ID.me system flags you, then you’ll be required to join a live video conference with one of the company’s “trusted referees” and that quote comes straight from the story so it sounds like ID.me also has some “untrustworthy referees” and they probably got them from the NBA because some of those guys won’t call traveling on LeBron James even if he starts carrying the ball somewhere around the half court line.

In your live video conference you’ll be required to hold up pieces of identification like a passport or birth certificate or health ID card and maybe drop your pants to show them that birthmark on your left butt cheek.

What about identical twins?

According to the internet 0.3% of the world’s population are identical twins which sounds like a facial recognition nightmare and reminds me that I have many regrets in Life and one of them is not creating a fictional identical twin named “Leroy” that I could blame for all mistakes and bad judgement and anytime anyone called me on my poor behavior I could say:

“Damn you, Leroy!”

So it’s not too late to create your own evil identical twin, because if there’s anything bad television from the 60s and 70s has taught us, it’s that creating an evil identical twin is easy; you just add a pencil-thin mustache.

Which reminds me…

Kansas City spent a shit ton of money (a description that accurately indicates my inability and lack of interest in finding the exact amount) to install a red light camera system in 2008.

Fast forward to 2012 and Kansas City quit using its expensive red light camera system when its legality was questioned because the system shifted the burden of proof to the defendant — they had to prove they weren’t driving the car that ran the red light — as opposed to requiring the prosecutor to prove the defendant was driving the car.

Full disclosure:

I once got a ticket for running a red light which I absolutely knew was bullshit because the light wasn’t red when I entered the intersection, so I went to the website that had video of the incident and not only did I run that red light, I ran it by quite a bit.

Which is conclusive proof we remember things the way we want to and if you don’t believe me, just ask Alex Gordon who scored the tying run in the ninth inning of Game 7 of the 2014 World Series which the Royals won when I came out as a pinch runner, stole second and scored on a bang-bang play at the plate in extra innings.

I’ll never forget that night because I also turned down Erin Andrews who wanted me to come back to her hotel room after the game. (Hey, if you’re going to make up memories, feel free to throw in the hot sideline reporter of your choice.)

Anyway…

One of the many problems bureaucracies have is the people who get promoted to the point they don’t actually do anything (they manage the people who do the actual work) so every once in a while those bureaucrats try to justify their oversized paychecks by rearranging the Titanic’s deck chairs or installing a red-light camera system or – in this particular case – requiring people who want to access IRS records to scan their faces.

And good luck with that.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/