Palantir runs inside European hospitals, police, and defence. Its 2024 EU tax gap: €12 million (about $13 million) on a $320 billion company.

Palantir's software is embedded in European healthcare platforms, policing systems, and defence procurement workflows. The same week a tax-accountability report put a roughly €12 million (about $13 million at current exchange rates) "conservative" 2024 European tax gap on the company, unions across Europe began demanding the procurement rules that let the dependency form in the first place.

The report, published on 5 August by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR), argues Palantir shifts European profits to the US, where stock-based compensation effectively wipes out its federal income tax bill. The headline number, a €12 million gap between what Palantir paid in Europe in 2024 and what CICTAR estimates it would owe without profit-shifting, is small next to a market capitalisation above $320 billion (about €278 billion). It is the contradiction CICTAR is asking European policymakers to confront: a company with deep operational reach into public services pays a fraction of what the activity would imply under ordinary tax principles.

Separate reporting by The Guardian on UK accounts corroborates the pattern. Palantir Technologies Ltd, the British subsidiary handling much of the company's European public-sector work, paid just £2 million (about $2.5 million at current exchange rates) in UK corporation tax in 2024, even as it booked contracts with the National Health Service and other public bodies. Politico EU's review identifies the wider mechanism: Palantir routes European earnings back to the US parent, where they are cleared of US federal income tax under rules that treat stock-based compensation as a deductible cost. Palantir's defence, in its filings and in statements to EUobserver, is that it follows the tax law in each jurisdiction and that its R&D and equity compensation reflect ordinary multinational practice.

The deployment footprint is what makes the tax finding politically actionable. CICTAR's report and a briefing from Corporate Europe Observatory, a Brussels-based corporate-influence watchdog, describe Palantir's software as embedded in healthcare scheduling platforms, in policing and migration data systems, and in the procurement and logistics tools that feed European defence ministries. Joana Louçã, a spokesperson for Corporate Europe Observatory, told EUobserver the company's tools are "positioned as part of an indispensable nervous system of the state, that not only locks in dependency, but its data analysis and integration work plays a role in shaping future policy decisions and directions." Amnesty International has separately flagged Palantir's AI-powered surveillance tools, including systems used to target pro-Palestine protestors and non-US citizens in support of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.

That overlap with state workflows is what unions are now pressing on. The same news cycle that produced CICTAR's report brought coordinated union demands for stricter rules on public contracts, including conditionality tied to a contractor's tax conduct, transparency over beneficial ownership, and human-rights clauses that can be triggered when a vendor's tools are used in ways European governments have pledged to oppose. Social Europe, the policy journal backing the union push, frames the ask in worker terms: public procurement should serve workers, not wealthy shareholders, and procurement rules are the lever.

The €12 million figure is what tax authorities can dispute. The deployment is harder to unwind. A hospital platform running on Palantir's software is not a line item, and a defence procurement system that has learned to depend on the same vendor is not switched out for the next budget cycle. Procurement rules decide whether the next contract goes to a vendor that books its profits in the country that pays for it, or whether the dependency extends.

The unions are asking for three things by name: public-procurement conditionality tied to contractor tax conduct, beneficial-ownership transparency across bidding consortia, and human-rights accountability clauses that survive contract renewal. Whether European institutions adopt any of them is the part of the story still to be written.