Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Accountancy and consultancy firm Deloitte has said it will partially refund payment for an Australian government report that contained multiple errors after admitting it was partly produced by artificial intelligence.
The Big Four firm has announced it will repay the final instalment of its government contract after conceding that some footnotes and references it contained were incorrect, Australia’s Department of Employment and Workplace Relations said last week.
Refunds fee for error-ridden report
The department had commissioned a A$439,000 (US$290,000) “independent assurance review” from Deloitte in December last year to help assess problems with a welfare system for automatically penalising jobseekers.
The Deloitte review was first published earlier this year, but a corrected version was uploaded last week on the departmental website. In late August the Australian Financial Review reported that the document contained multiple errors, including references and citations to non-existent reports by academics at the universities of Sydney and Lund in Sweden.
The substance of the review and its recommendations had not changed, the Australian government added. The contract will be made public once the transaction is completed, it said. The embarrassing episode underscores the dangers posed to consultancies by using AI technology, particularly the danger of “hallucinations”.
The Big Four consulting firms, as well as strategy houses such as McKinsey, have poured billions of pounds into AI research and development in a bid to keep nimble smaller competitors at bay. They hope to use the technology to accelerate the speed at which they can provide advice and audits to clients.
The UK accountancy regulator warned in June that the Big Four firms were failing to keep track of how automated tools and AI affected the quality of their audits, even as firms escalate their use of the technology to perform risk assessments and obtain evidence.
In the updated version of the report, Deloitte added references to the use of generative AI in its appendix. It states that a part of the report “included the use of a generative artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (Azure OpenAI GPT — 4o) based tool chain” licensed by the government department.
While Deloitte did not state that AI caused the mistakes in its original report, it admitted that the updated version corrected errors with citations, references, and one summary of legal proceedings.
“The updates made in no way impact or affect the substantive content, findings and recommendations in the report,” Deloitte stated in the amended version. Deloitte Australia said: “The matter has been resolved directly with the client.”