Hackathon: IRS and DOGE want to lift tax data of US citizens in Palantir

The US tax authorities have stored names, addresses, social security numbers and much more about American citizens in their databases – and everything is now to be transferred to centralized software from a private company. Engineers from the agency are already working on the project with representatives from the government organization DOGE and the software company Palantir. The latter was co-founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel and is to supply the required cloud.

DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, was set up by Elon Musk, also a tech billionaire, and US President Donald Trump, who established the organization by decree. It aims to make the bureaucratic structures of the US state more efficient, and often to make massive cuts – The next turning point is likely to be at the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

All data to be transferred to Palantir

A spokesperson for the Treasury Department confirmed to US magazine Wired that an IRS team is already working on "streamlining the agency's systems and creating the most efficient service for American taxpayers." According to Wired information, a central application programming interface (API) is to be created for this purpose, which will bring together data from all IRS databases. This in turn is to be accessible with Palantir's Software Foundry, which is to provide a central "reading center" for all IRS systems.

This is apparently what those responsible hope to achieve: All tax data could be retrieved quickly and easily in one place. At API level, the data could then possibly even be compared with interoperable data sets from other US authorities.

Efficiency revelation or single point of failure?

On the other hand, the single point of failure that may arise with this structure seems to be no disadvantage at all – a single weak point that is enough to cause a complete system failure. Because where everything can be accessed with one API, unauthorized individuals only need to crack one API to access everything. This was recently demonstrated by security researcher Lilith Wittmann. She recently managed to access numerous data of hundreds of thousands of players via the poorly secured API of software for online casinos – ID cards, health data, bank documents and more. "It seems that other teams have always built the integration with third-party providers or for payment providers," Wittmann told heise online with regard to the software's poor authorization management.

Meanwhile, the team for the plans at the IRS is apparently made up as follows: In addition to several DOGE representatives, dozens of IRS software engineers and a handful of Palantir representatives are said to be working on the project, which was initially called a hackathon by DOGE this week, Wired had previously reported. Typically for US tech companies, this is an event where a large number of people come together to program together. The aim is for the group to create a solution to a specific problem within a specified time – often using agile development tools.

The magazine also learned from the DOGE team that only around 30 days are planned for the development of the API in question. The team is led by Sam Corcos, whose company is developing a health app and who previously worked as an engineer for Elon Musk at SpaceX.

Palantir is likely to be delighted with the new explosive government contract. The company has already won several others and earned billions of US dollars. Including from Germany, where the Bavarian police are already using a "cross-procedural research and analysis platform" (VeRA) based on Palantir's "Gotham" software; similar systems are also in use in Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia. Palantir's products are considered reliable, but also controversial, because they attempt to penetrate as deeply as possible into as many private and state areas as possible; the implementation of the IRS plans would be a new milestone in this respect.

(nen)