yahoo news | The IRS Lost a Quarter of its Staff & Called Palantir
The Internal Revenue Service has shed roughly a quarter of its workforce in recent years, prompting the agency to turn to private‑sector technology to shore up its audit capabilities. In 2025 the IRS awarded Palantir a $1.8 million contract to improve a custom “Selection and Analytic Platform” (SNAP), a pilot tool meant to pinpoint the most valuable cases for audits, collections and potential criminal investigations. Agency officials said the existing maze of more than 100 business systems and 700 methods was producing duplicated effort, high costs and poor case selection, so they turned to Palantir’s data‑layer technology—distinct from its flagship Gotham or Foundry products—to streamline and prioritize work as tax season approaches.
Palantir’s expanding role inside the federal government stems from the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” a 900‑page blueprint aimed at shrinking the “administrative state” and substituting private tech firms for under‑staffed agencies. The plan, backed by a coalition of conservative organizations, advocates attrition‑driven cuts that make agencies appear ineffective, then invites contractors to fill the gaps. Pew Research reported a 10.3 % reduction in the federal workforce in 2025, equating to about 238,000 jobs lost. Palantir, whose leadership and investors have long aligned with Trump‑era politics, was a natural pick for the IRS, mirroring similar privatization pushes at the TSA and other departments.
The partnership carries an ironic twist: Palantir co‑founder Peter Thiel has a well‑documented history of tax avoidance, having built a multi‑billion‑dollar tax‑free war chest through a Roth IRA maneuver. He now helps craft the very tool meant to hunt down such strategies. Moreover, Palantir’s SNAP will likely run third‑party AI models—such as those from OpenAI, Anthropic or others—through its Maven Smart System, potentially feeding those companies massive amounts of confidential taxpayer data. Whether that represents a breakthrough in efficiency or a privacy vulnerability depends on the lens through which it is viewed.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/irs-lost-quarter-staff-called-192053162.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
#irs #palantir #heritagefoundation #project2025 #trump
