When the US government began offering financial aid to Americans struggling to cope with a pandemic-fueled economic collapse in 2020, the Department of Treasury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation urged Americans to be ever more vigilant about their personal information. COVID-19 scams seemed to be everywhere, and for government agencies, it became difficult to ensure that all the money it was sending out actually made it to the citizens most in need of aid—and not into the hands of bad actors. It’s now estimated that hundreds of billions in COVID relief funds were stolen,
Bloomberg reported, with no way of knowing the true cost of the losses.
It has perhaps never been clearer to the federal government how impactful it could be during times of emergency to already have trusted nationwide digital identification verification systems in place.
Unfortunately, that’s not where COVID-19 found America. Last year,
McKinsey conducted an analysis of 12 countries, including the US, that provided COVID-19 aid. It found that the countries that were most successful in distributing aid to the right people were the ones that had already invested in digitizing financial infrastructure, including “the presence of a basic digital identification system with broad population coverage.” Countries like Singapore and India cover more than 80 percent of their populations with such a system; the US population coverage with digital IDs was around 70 percent in 2021.
arstechnica.com
