Over 6 millions Australians have used myGovID to access online government services, said Stuart Robert, the Minister responsible for digital transformation.

myGovID, handled by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), is the Australian government's digital identity provider and allows citizens to have their identity verified through a single channel to access government services rather than having to be verified individually by each Commonwealth entity.

Of that number of myGovIDs, more than half of them -- around 3.3 million -- were created in the past six months, the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) said.

According to an ATO spokesperson, the sharp uptick was due to a variety of factors, such as the ATO Tax Time period commencing in July which drove significant volume in online transactions for individuals and business, more users linking their myGovID to myGov to access linked agencies, and more government services being added over that period.

In the government's previous update that was provided in the DTA's annual report last month, the agency said only 2.73 million digital identities had been created as of the end of June, while the myGovID app had been downloaded 3.5 million times at that point in time. In June 2020, those figures were 1.44 million and almost 1.9 million, respectively. 

In the latest annual report, the DTA also said the number of active users of myGov increased to 20 million over the past year, up from 18.7 million in 2019-20.

With myGovID uptake continuing to increase, the federal government announced in October it has begun looking into expanding the application of Australia's federal digital identity system to state and territory governments and the private sector. While myGovID has been available since 2019, it only verifies citizens' identities for services from federal government entities.

In the private sector, Eftpos earlier this year became the first accredited non-government operator of a digital identity exchange through its connectID technology. 

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