Consulting firm Deloitte has again found itself under scrutiny for sending a government agency a report containing inaccurate information, likely coming from artificial intelligence. The company responded to the allegations, saying they would fix the issues and that AI didn’t write the report, but that it did assist with citations.
The Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador paid Deloitte Canada to produce an analysis of several health care-related topics, including telehealth and the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on the health care industry’s workers. The report, released in May, is 526 pages long.
An access-to-information request, the Canadian equivalent of a U.S. Freedom of Information Act request, filed by Canadian blogger Matt Barter said the province paid Deloitte nearly $1.6 million CAD (around $1.1 million USD) over a series of installments.
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An investigation by the local news agency The Independent found that the report contained several errors, which it attributed to artificial intelligence hallucinations. The outlet found four citations that don’t appear to exist. They contacted one of the authors cited in the report, who confirmed she hadn’t worked with some of the other cited writers.
“It sounds like if you’re coming up with things like this, they may be pretty heavily using AI to generate work,” one of the erroneously cited authors told The Independent.
A spokesperson for the Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Health and Community Services told the Penticton Herald that they had confirmed the irregularities in the report were mistakes and had contacted Deloitte to address the issue.
Deloitte response
The London-based firm’s Canadian office defended the report, saying it would work to fix the issue after it was discovered to have contained errors.
“Deloitte Canada firmly stands behind the recommendations put forward in our report,” a Deloitte Canada spokesperson told Fortune.
The spokesperson told the outlet that the company would revise the report to address some citation issues, though this would not affect the findings.
Not the first time
The incident is the second in as many months for the consulting firm.
The Australian government accused Deloitte in October of producing a report on how to reduce welfare spending that contained AI hallucinations similar to the ones found in Canada. The 237-page report also contained a fictitious quote from a federal court judgment.
A politician told Radio-Canada that the provincial government should seek a refund similar to what Australia was given.
