ScotAccount – A New Way for Users to Access Online Public Services in Scotland

ScotAccount is the Digital Identity program for the Scottish public sector.

The digital identity service is intended to simplify the process of accessing public services by allowing users to sign in to multiple services with a single account.

In this blog Laurie Brown, Digital Information Security Officer, provides strategic information security direction, assurance, and governance across a number of Scottish Government digital public services including the work to introduce ScotAccount.

ScotAccount went live in partnership with Disclosure Scotland as a pilot at the end of February 2023, where it has been integrated into Disclosure Scotland’s new online service, providing users with digital access to their disclosure results.

ScotAccount is exploring compliance with the UK’s digital identity and attributes trust framework, potentially paving the way for future interoperability with the GOV.UK One Login service.

Other initiatives include ‘Vouchsafe‘, being developed to provide a social vouching element for proving an identity. This involves one person with a verified identity vouching for another to establish their digital identity, rather than relying on a document such as a passport or driving licence.

History

Previous Identity projects leading up to this include:

• Announced on their web site and documented in their case study Yoti signed a deal with the Improvement Service to help transform local and regional services, and give Scottish residents an easier and safer way of proving their age and entitlement to access a wide range of services, rewards and discounts.
• The Digital Identity team and Digital Health and Social Care Institute completed a trial with Mydex, to test the use of a strong authentication credential (registration/login) to enable re-use across services and also establishing a citizen controlled attribute store that is also re-usable across services. The project is documented in detail in this Mydex report.
• Condatis undertook a Proof of Concept project for the Scottish Government, where service providers, such as Social Security Scotland, need to have confidence in the identity of the citizen accessing their services balanced with a seamless and productive user experience.