Deloitte refunded a government for a report full of invented citations
· 4 min read
In 2025 Deloitte delivered a report to Australia's Department of Employment and Workplace Relations on the welfare compliance system. The contract was worth roughly A$439,000. The report was published on the department's website in July.
Chris Rudge, a health and welfare law researcher at the University of Sydney, read it and told reporters it was full of fabricated references. A revised version followed. Citations pointing to works that did not exist were removed, along with quotes attributed to a Federal Court judge and references to reports credited to named academics who had not written them.
Deloitte later acknowledged that generative AI had been used in preparing the report, disclosed it in the revised version, and agreed to repay part of the contract.
The part worth sitting with
This was not a rushed blog post. It was a paid deliverable from one of the largest professional services firms in the world, for a government department, on a subject with legal consequences. It went through whatever review that firm applies.
And the errors still shipped, because they were invisible to review. A reference list looks like a reference list. Checking it means looking up every entry, which nobody does by hand on a document of that length — which is precisely why an automated pass exists.
The revised report kept the same recommendations. The conclusions did not depend on the fabricated sources; the sources had been generated to support conclusions already written. That is worth noticing, because it is how these errors usually appear: not as a wrong answer, but as invented support for a plausible one.
What would have caught it
A citation to a non-existent work is checkable in seconds. So is a quote attributed to a named judge in a named judgment. Both are claims about documents that either exist or do not.
The economics are stark: a check costs about a penny. The report cost roughly A$439,000 and part of it was repaid, before counting what the coverage cost.
Paste a draft and see what holds up — a check a day, free, no card.
Sources
CFO Dive: Deloitte refunds for report with AI errors · OECD.AI incident record
Claim Check reads a draft, pulls out every factual claim, and checks each one against a real source before you publish. Try it on something you are about to publish.