The Scottish Government has added HM Passport Office verification to ScotAccount, its single sign-in digital identity service, giving users a route to prove who they are that does not depend on a financial history.
ScotAccount Service Owner David Duncan-Fraser set out the change in a Scottish Government blog post. He described HMPO verification as “an additional secure and trusted way to verify their identity,” and framed it as a digital inclusion measure.
Existing identity verification routes often lean on an established digital footprint, such as records of financial activity. Duncan-Fraser said younger users frequently do not have one, which can leave them unable to complete a check. He said HMPO verification gives those users another way to confirm who they are.
“ScotAccount is helping to reduce barriers that can prevent people from accessing online services by widening the range of verification capabilities we support,” he wrote.
FutureScot reports that ScotAccount now has 900,000 users and runs across 10 government services, among them the MyCare health and social care app, Disclosure Scotland and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service Witness Gateway. According to that report, users enter a passport number and expiry date to be checked against HM Passport Office records. They then photograph the passport photo page and take a selfie for document and biometric checks, a process FutureScot puts at under five minutes.
FutureScot also reported that ScotAccount retains no documentation or images, deleting them once a check completes, and asks users whether they want to save their verified identity for reuse before returning them to the service they came from.
Duncan-Fraser said the government is applying what it learned from the passport work more widely, “exploring how information from official documents can be validated against authoritative sources to make identity verification simpler, and more reliable.”
Scotland has run ScotAccount separately from the UK government’s GOV.UK One Login, though it sought interoperability between the two systems in 2024. One Login has had its own difficulties with document-based proofing, restoring Post Office identity checks in May after an outage.
Sources: Scottish Government, FutureScot
–
By the ID Tech Editorial Team
Follow Us