In Brief

Palantir has helped the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigations office probe a variety of financial crimes in the U.S. for much of the last decade, The Intercept reported.

The IRS has paid the firm $130 million since 2018 to use its data analysis software to pore over financial records for investigative purposes, the outlet reported citing public records detailing Palantir’s IRS contract that were obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight.

It was previously known the IRS was using Palantir’s products, and that the agency sees the software as a way to automate and modernize audits. Last summer, it was also reported that Palantir was assisting DOGE, the “government efficiency” initiative launched by President Trump’s executive order with a project designed to access IRS records. However, the extent of the agency’s use of the company’s tools had not been previously reported.

The software, Palantir’s Lead and Case Analytics platform, is being used to aggregate and analyze data across a variety of federal agencies. The software can find “connections from millions of records with thousands of links” between various databases, and the tool is particularly good at mapping human relationships and communications, according to the outlet. 

Earlier this week, the American Oversight Project sued the Trump administration for public records related to numerous federal agencies’ use of Palantir tools, including the IRS. TechCrunch has reached out to Palantir for more information and will update the article if the company responds.

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