HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Algorithm Wrongly Flags 200,000 for Housing Benefit Fraud

June 23, 2024

A Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) algorithm mistakenly flagged more than 200,000 UK housing benefit claims as high risk. Consequently, these claims underwent unnecessary investigations. The majority of these flagged claims were found to be legitimate, leading to waste of public funds and unnecessary stress for claimants. Initially successful in a pilot program, the algorithm's real-world performance failed to meet expectations. This incident underscores the potential risks associated with excessive reliance on automated systems in welfare administration.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
department-for-work-and-pensions-(dwp)
Alleged developer
department-for-work-and-pensions-(dwp)
Alleged harmed parties
uk-general-public, uk-housing-benefit-claimants

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/738

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.