Part of the issue seems to be getting other departments and agencies in government to let another take responsibility for "login" - authentication gives interna

Part of the issue seems to be getting other departments and agencies in government to let another take responsibility for "login" - authentication gives internal leverage and "power" over other departments... It shouldn't be seen that way, but this is definitely the case in a number of countries. The solution is central SSO-by-and-for-govt, run as an in-house capability. This isn't in itself uncontroversial (many countries don't have a unique primary key for easily linking individuals across datasets) - people who are in favour of smaller government are likely to be unkeen on a single government account they have to verify and then use to access taxes, healthcare, etc - they're used to separation of powers between agencies. The challenge for government is they're not just providing TOFU-style SSO - they need to also validate each user's "identity" against other datasets to ascertain to a certain level of confidence who the individual is, and that it's really them and not a fraudster. This is hard for government as nobody wants to be on the hook to another department when their verification was inadequate for some future use-case (think covid emergency loans).