Palantir Is Helping Trump’s IRS Conduct “Massive-Scale” Data Mining

military contractor Palantir is helping the IRS analyze dozens of different data sets on Americans to investigate a broad range of financial crimes, according to records shared with The Intercept. Since 2018, the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division has used Palantir’s Lead and Case Analytics platform to aggregate and analyze a sprawling list of sensitive federal databases and data sets. Public records detailing Palantir’s IRS contract, obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight and shared exclusively with The Intercept, reveal the immense volume of data plugged into the military contractor’s software. The LCA uses both Palantir’s Gotham and Foundry applications to facilitate “analysis of massive-scale data to find the needle in the hay stack,” the contract paperwork says. Documents indicate the IRS has paid Palantir over $130 million for these services to date. Palantir’s LCA is ostensibly directed toward cracking down on fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes. According to a 2024 agency privacy impact assessment, IRS “Special agents and investigative analysts … utilize the platform to find, analyze, and visualize connections between disparate sets of data to generate leads, identify schemes, uncover tax fraud, and conduct money laundering and forfeiture investigative activities.” The IRS use of