HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

UK Government AI Allegedly Targets Disproportionate Numbers of Certain Nationals for Fraud Review

December 6, 2021

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) faced scrutiny due to reports of unexplained suspensions of Universal Credit benefits by Bulgarian nationals. The MP for Edmonton raised concerns about potential nationality-based targeting for benefit fraud investigations, which could lead to poverty and homelessness among affected individuals. An equality impact assessment conducted by the Home Office found a disproportionate number of marriages from Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania were flagged.

This incident underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices in governmental systems. For those interested in shaping the future of harm prevention through responsible AI governance, consider joining Project Cerebellum to collaborate on mapping and managing such incidents using the HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern).

Matched TAIM controls

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

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.