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

Military contractor Palantir has been paid more than $130 million by the IRS to analyze sensitive federal databases.

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.”

Trump Wants to Put You in a Massive, Secret Government Database

The IRS use of the software, launched under Trump’s first term and expanded under Biden, is now in the hands of an IRS Criminal Investigations office that has drastically scaled back its pursuit of tax cheats and pivoted, under Trump’s direction, toward investigating “left-leaning groups,” the Wall Street Journal reported in October.

“The real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single system with minimal transparency — especially one built and operated by a contractor like Palantir, whose business model is premised on integrating data and expanding surveillance capabilities,” American Oversight director Chioma Chukwu said in a statement to The Intercept. “Its platforms have been used in deeply troubling contexts, from immigration enforcement to predictive policing, with persistent concerns about overreach, bias, and weak oversight.”

Palantir did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the IRS.

“The real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single........

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