Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) AI Systems Allegedly Discriminate Against Single Mothers

July 10, 2024

Single mothers allegedly face financial hardship due to biased algorithms within the Department for Work and Pensions' Universal Credit system, which disproportionately impacts their eligibility and detects fraud. These automated processes are reportedly introducing biases, causing issues such as miscalculated earnings and delayed childcare reimbursements. Such challenges contribute to income volatility and debt among single mothers.

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Alleged deployer
department-for-work-and-pensions-(dwp)
Alleged developer
department-for-work-and-pensions-(dwp)
Alleged harmed parties
single-mothers, british-single-mothers

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/740

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

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