HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Purportedly Taxpayer-Funded Deloitte Report for Australian Government Contains Alleged AI-Generated Citations and Fabricated Legal Quote

August 22, 2025

A $439,000 Deloitte report for the Australian Department of Employment and Workplace Relations on welfare compliance allegedly contained fabricated references and a misattributed legal quote. Deleted citations reportedly referred to non-existent works, and a Federal Court judgment was misstated. Deloitte later acknowledged limited use of generative AI in preparing the report and issued a corrected version with a partial refund.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
deloitte
Alleged developer
unknown-large-language-model-developers
Alleged harmed parties
scholars-erroneously-cited, lisa-burton-crawford, janina-boughey, government-of-australia, general-public-of-australia, epistemic-integrity, department-of-employment-and-workplace-relations-(dewr), carolyn-adams, academics, deloitte

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1193

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.