Over the past decade, Palantir has helped the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation investigate a variety of financial crimes in the United States, The Intercept reported.
The IRS reported paying the company $130 million since 2018 to use data analytics software to examine financial records for investigative purposes, citing public records detailing Palantir’s IRS contracts obtained by the nonprofit watchdog American Oversight.
It has previously been reported that the IRS is using Palantir’s products and that the agency sees the software as a way to automate and modernize audits. Last summer, Palantir was reported to be supporting DOGE, a “government efficiency” initiative launched under President Trump’s executive order, with a project designed to access IRS records. However, the extent to which the agency used the company’s tools has not previously been reported.
The software, Palantir’s Lead and Case Analytics platform, is being used to aggregate and analyze data from various federal agencies. The software can find “connections from millions of records with thousands of links” between various databases, and the tool is said to be particularly good at mapping human relationships and communications.
Earlier this week, American Oversight sued the Trump administration over public records related to the use of Palantir tools by numerous federal agencies, including the IRS. TechCrunch has reached out to Palantir for more information and will update the article if the company responds.
