Misleading Automated Debt Assessments by Australian DHS: A Case for Responsible AI

July 1, 2015

The Australian Department of Human Services' automated debt assessment system erroneously issued false or incorrect debt notices to hundreds of thousands, leading to years-long legal battles and detrimental impact on welfare recipients. This AI incident maps to the Govern function in HISPI Project Cerebellum Trusted AI Model (TAIM). Ready to help prevent such incidents and shape trustworthy AI? JOIN US
Alleged deployer
australian-department-of-human-services
Alleged developer
centrelink
Alleged harmed parties
australian-welfare-recipients

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/57

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.