UK Government AI Allegedly Targets Disproportionate Numbers of Certain Nationals for Fraud Review
December 6, 2021
The UK's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) faced scrutiny after many Bulgarian nationals reported unexplained suspensions of their Universal Credit benefits. The MP for Edmonton raised concerns about potential nationality-based targeting for benefit fraud investigations, leading to poverty and homelessness among affected individuals. The Home Office's own equality impact assessment found it was flagging a disproportionate number of marriages from Greece, Albania, Bulgaria and Romania.
- Alleged deployer
- various-british-government-offices, home-office, department-for-work-and-pensions, british-government
- Alleged developer
- home-office, department-for-work-and-pensions, british-government
- Alleged harmed parties
- romanians-in-the-united-kingdom, greeks-in-the-united-kingdom, bulgarians-in-the-united-kingdom, british-public, albanians-in-the-united-kingdom
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/611
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.