Claimants to be able to logon to Universal Credit via PayPal!
The UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have just disclosed the contract details for the supply of logon services for Universal Credit, the biggest shake-up of benefits calculation for over 40 years. Later this year claimants will be able to logon via any of eight ‘ID Providers’
The surprise is that until this week DWP had only mentioned seven ID Providers. One more ID Provider has just been added to the list, it is the only bank awarded the contract – and it’s PayPal!
Here is the information hidden away on the 4th Page of the contract details:
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© Brian Wernham 2013 CC BY-NC-ND
brianwernham 
Many have tweeted to me for more information on this:
The contract as published shows that the taxpayer will be spending £25m on the service over two years.
(See page 1 of https://brianwernham.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/paypal-logon-for-universal-credit-brian-wernham.pdf)
The projected final volume is 21m claimants to support the rollout of universal credit and personal independence payments from March this year.
There are eight federated ID providers that a claimant can choose – but they will do more than just provide ‘Facebook’ type logon – they will be carrying out background checks on claimants to ensure that they are who they claim to be. PayPal and the others will be providing a “Level Of Assurance” (LOA) on each claimant’s identity using the recently published Cabinet Office Identity Assurance ‘Good Practice Guidance’ (GPGs) like this one:
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/GPG_43_RSDOPS_issue_1.1_Dec_2012.pdf “
Update: Chris Ferguson of the UK Cabinet Office explains the ‘Federated ID’ scheme in more detail (text and supporting video):
http://www.ukauthority.com/Headlines/tabid/36/NewsArticle/tabid/64/Default.aspx?id=3962&goback=.gde_4381188_member_207503101