ID.me

ID.me is a private digital-identity company founded in 2010 and headquartered in McLean, Virginia. It provides a federated identity and single-sign-on service: a person proves their identity once and can then access many government, healthcare, and commercial services without re-verifying each time, combining document checks, data verification, and optional facial-recognition and biometric matching to meet federal identity-assurance requirements.

The company reports supporting more than 156 million users across 21 federal agencies, 50 state agencies, and 70 or more healthcare organizations. Its government footprint has grown through major awards, including a Treasury and IRS blanket purchase agreement valued up to roughly 1.03 billion dollars through December 2030, and a role verifying Medicare.gov beneficiaries for CMS starting in early 2026.

ID.me has drawn the sharpest civil-rights and oversight scrutiny in its category. Civil-rights groups have called for halting government use over facial-recognition accuracy that can disproportionately impact people of color and marginalized communities, and a congressional watchdog faulted the IRS for lax oversight of ID.me's use of AI. Biometric verification can create access barriers when automated checks fail, and concentrating identity data for 156 million people in one vendor raises privacy and data-security concerns.