Your tax return may soon be flagged for audit not by a human examiner, but by an algorithm built by a Silicon Valley defense contractor. That should concern every American, regardless of party.

The Internal Revenue Service has paid Palantir Technologies more than $200 million in contracts since 2014, including $1.8 million last year to develop a tool called the Selection and Analytic Platform, or SNAP. According to documents obtained through public records requests, SNAP is designed to surface the "highest-value" targets for audits, unpaid tax collection, and potential criminal investigations. It does this by pulling from a maze of legacy IRS databases and analyzing unstructured data from supporting documents, including potentially public transaction records from platforms like Venmo and storefronts like Etsy and Depop.

The American public has never been told this is happening. There has been no congressional debate. No public comment period. No independent review of how SNAP selects its targets or what safeguards exist to prevent errors, bias, or abuse.

This is not a partisan issue. Conservatives who distrust government surveillance, progressives who worry about algorithmic discrimination, and libertarians who believe in due process should all be asking the same questions: Who decided that a private tech contractor should help determine which Americans get investigated? How does the algorithm work? What data is it drawing on? And who is accountable when it gets it wrong?

The IRS has a long history of failed modernization efforts and rapid leadership turnover. Embedding an opaque AI system into its audit selection process, built and maintained by a corporation with billions in government contracts, without any public transparency is not modernization. It is an unchecked expansion of government power dressed up as efficiency.

Congress must act. Lawmakers should require the IRS to publicly disclose how AI and algorithmic tools are being used in audit case selection, mandate independent audits of those tools for accuracy and bias, and establish clear limits on what private contractors like Palantir can access, build, and decide on behalf of the American government.

Sign this petition to demand that Congress bring transparency and accountability to AI-powered tax enforcement before it goes any further.