Financial consulting firm Deloitte was forced to reissue the Australian government $291,000 US after getting caught using AI and including hallucinated numbers in a recent report.
As The Guardian reports, Australia’s Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) confirmed that the firm agreed to repay the final installment as part of its contract. It had been commissioned in December to review a system that automates penalties in the welfare system in case jobseekers don’t meet their mutual obligations.
However, the “independent assurance review” bore concerning signs that Deloitte had cut corners, and included multiple errors such as references to nonexistent citations — a hallmark of AI slop.
The “hallucinations” once again highlight how generative AI use in the workplace can allow glaring mistakes to slip through, from lawyers getting caught citing nonexistent cases to Trump’s Centers for Disease Control referencing a study that was dreamed up by AI earlier this year.
Deloitte, among other consulting firms, have poured billions of dollars into developing AI tools that they say could speed up their audits, as the Financial Times reports.
Earlier today, the newspaper noted that the United Kingdom’s six largest accounting firms hadn’t been formally monitoring how AI impacts the quality of their audits, highlighting the possibility that many other reports may include similar hallucinations.
University of Sydney sociological lecturer Christopher Rudge, who first highlighted the issues with Deloitte’s DEWR report, said that the company tried to cover its tracks after sharing an updated version of the error-laden report.
“Instead of just substituting one hallucinated fake reference for a new ‘real’ reference, they’ve substituted the fake hallucinated references and in the new version, there’s like five, six or seven or eight in their place,” he told The Guardian. “So what that suggests is that the original claim made in the body of the report wasn’t based on any one particular evidentiary source.”
Despite being caught red-handed using AI to generate hallucinated citations, Deloitte said that the overall thrust of its guidance hadn’t changed. A footnote in the revised version noted that staffers had used OpenAI’s GPT-4o for the report.
“Deloitte conducted the independent assurance review and has confirmed some footnotes and references were incorrect,” a spokesperson told The Guardian. “The substance of the independent review is retained, and there are no changes to the recommendations.”
But outraged lawmakers calling for more oversight.
“Deloitte has a human intelligence problem,” Labor senator Deborah O’Neill, who represents New South Wales, told the Australian Financial Review. “This would be laughable if it wasn’t so lamentable… too often, as our parliamentary inquiries have shown, these consulting firms win contracts by promising their expertise, and then when the deal is signed, they give you whatever [staff] costs them the least.”
“Anyone looking to contract these firms should be asking exactly who is doing the work they are paying for, and having that expertise and no AI use verified,” O’Neill added. “Otherwise, perhaps instead of a big consulting firm procurers would be better off signing up for a ChatGPT subscription.”
“This report was meant to help expose the failures in our welfare system and ensure fair treatment for income support recipients, but instead Labor [is] letting Deloitte take them for a ride,” Greens senator Penny Allman-Payne told the AFR. “Labor should be insisting on a full refund from Deloitte, and they need to stop outsourcing their decisions to their consultant mates.”
More on hallucinations: Fixing Hallucinations Would Destroy ChatGPT, Expert Finds
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