Facial recognition technology has failed half the time in tests of a landmark government system, adding to the costs, time and questions around it.

OIA documents raise the prospect of it failing even more on Māori.

The Identity Check system is aimed at becoming the primary way New Zealanders verify who they are online, for access to thousands of public and private services, from benefits to banks.

But officials are having to embark on a second year of tests after facial recognition system failed 45 per cent of the time in the first lot of tests.

"Current success levels are approximately 55 percent - this is not commercially viable for widespread adoption of the service," says a July 2023 memo from the Internal Affairs Department, disclosed under the Official Information Act.

So it is upgrading to a way of using AI-based algorithms to ensure no one is gaming the system by holding up a photo of someone else, or some other fake - called liveness detection. Tests since December indicate this could hit a 90 per cent pass rate.

The Ministry of Social Development is already integrating Identity Check into its systems though beneficiaries can still opt to verify their identity using existing methods.

The tech gremlins run parallel to problems consulting the public.

"In recent years, general concern with the use of biometrics has grown and the department has yet to meet its obligations to seek and consider the views of Māori (in relation to its use of biometrics) as partners under the Treaty of Waitangi," said an Internal Affairs a memo in June 2023. A year ago the department told RNZ it had engaged with Māori.

Facial recognition is a form of biometrics.

"Identity Check will likely face more media scrutiny when exiting the pilot phase if engagement has not yet commenced."

Unanswered questions remain about whether the tech treated different ethnicities the same, it adds.

The department told RNZ it has now agreed on how to engage with Māori.

Identity Check is "one of the first cabs off the rank " of the government's multimillion-dollar Delivering Future Identity Services Project, underpinned by an Act passed this year that sets up a "trust framework".

Kicking in July 2024, the Act "will create rules and regulatory oversight to help people and businesses prove who they are in a secure and efficient way so they can access services, transact, and generally live and work in a digital world".

At least $70m is going into this and into modernising the RealMe identity-proving system.

Identity Check typically matches an image sent in by smartphone to a passport or driver's licence photo.

At a later date it "will extend to use NZ citizenship and immigration data", Internal Affairs says. RNZ has asked for more details about that.

"High quality and secure facial liveness capability is critical to future digital services that require online identity verification. If not done well, users return to in-person channels undermining the technology opportunity, costing people time and money, and inhibiting growth in digital services," the department told the government.

But the grand designs have hit hurdles.

After slim pickings from Budget 2022, a memo in May 2023 said: "This work has been paused for the last six weeks because the project did not have sufficient business and project resources available to driving the work forward."

A status report in July said that without "stable and sufficient funding", the vendor Irish tech giant Daon "may lose confidence".

Risk assessments rated the project amber in August, though without any red flags. "The key risk for resolution is to ensure the design is correctly specified/not gold-plated."

Tests began in September 2022 for people wanting an over-18 identity card from Hospitality New Zealand. But the Kiwi Access service was forced by the 45 percent fail rate to "undertake significant remedial action to develop alternative" ID checks, adding to costs, the newly released memos show.

"It has highlighted that ongoing investment will be required to ensure that service levels expected by client organisations are achieved. At this point, we are some way from achieving this," a memo in July said.

Officials who had previously talked up the prospects of wide and fast uptake of Identity Check, are now delaying approval of the business case till next year, to understand what it would cost to make it work and "to understand more around the market dynamics around uptake and usage of the service".

"As part of the pilot implementation the department has received information from its vendor (Daon) in relation to the difference in system performance regarding skin tone," the June memo said.

"This technology is emergent and requires further testing and iteration to get it to a standard where there's close to >80 percent success rates by people using it. We are not there yet, which is why we need to keep working with the technology so when we deploy Identity Check at market scale, we know it's going to deliver the desired customer outcomes and manage the integrity and fraud risks we are starting to see in the environment (morphing, spoofing and digital injection of images)."

-Phil Pennington/RNZ.