Palantir and DOGE Collaborating on Massive IRS Data Project

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For the past three days Peter Thiel’s software company Palantir, Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” and dozens of Internal Revenue Service software engineers have been in a hackathon to create a “mega API” for accessing all the tax agency’s databases.

DOGE is a subset of a White House IT team, not a government department.

An Application Programming Interface allows different software systems to exchange data. DOGE wants the API to be able to access all IRS data, including the personally identifiable data it is currently prohibited from accessing by a court order such as taxpayer names, addresses, social security numbers, tax returns, and employment data. Using Palantir’s Foundry platform, DOGE envisions using the API as a one-stop facility for reading and changing IRS data.

In the short term, DOGE may intend to use the API to bypass the court order by using it to copy data elsewhere and working with the copy. The API can also be used to match IRS records with records about the same person or organization in other government databases.

The project is headed by DOGE’s Sam Corcos, a health-tech CEO and a former SpaceX engineer. The API is expected to be complete within 30 days.

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