AIFoPa-2025-0002
Date of Record: 07 Oct 2025
3 min read
He Had Never Heard of the Book
Deloitte charged the Australian government A$440,000 for a review of its welfare penalty system. It cited a book that a real professor had never written.
Dr Chris Rudge researches health and welfare law at the University of Sydney. In August 2025 he read a report that Deloitte had written for the federal government. Early in it, the report credited one of his colleagues with a book.
The colleague was Lisa Burton Crawford, a professor of public and constitutional law. The book had a title well outside her field. She had not written it. Nobody had.
“I instantaneously knew it was either hallucinated by AI or the world’s best kept secret,” Rudge said. “I’d never heard of the book and it sounded preposterous.”
The report reviewed the Targeted Compliance Framework. That is the system that automatically penalises job seekers who miss their welfare obligations. The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations had paid A$440,000 for the review.
Rudge found up to 20 errors in its 237 pages. Papers were credited to real academics who had not written them. A quotation was credited to a Federal Court judge who had not said it.
Rudge considered the judge the more serious error. The report was, in effect, an audit of whether the department obeyed the law. It had misstated the law to the department.
Deloitte uploaded a corrected version on a Friday in October. It added a disclosure that part of the work had used a GPT-4o tool on the department’s own Microsoft Azure account. The Bureau notes the day without editorial comment.
The department said the substance of the review was retained and its recommendations were unchanged. Deloitte agreed to repay the final instalment of its fee. It said the matter had been resolved directly with the client.
A Labor senator, Deborah O’Neill, said Deloitte had “a human intelligence problem.” The revised report corrected its footnotes. It did not address this.