A contract with billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies will give the IRS new firepower to pursue tax cheats by connecting the dots in millions of tax filings, bank transactions, phone records, and even social media posts.
The IRS on Sept. 27 signed the deal for $99 million over seven years, according to the contract. It comes at the end of a period when the Internal Revenue Service lost hundreds of special agents to budget cuts while being overwhelmed by data volume that reached the equivalent of 1.5 trillion text files last year, a tenfold increase in a decade. ...