AIFoPa-2026-0050
Date of Record: 25 Oct 2026
3 min read
The Disclosure Was in the Report This Time
Western Australia paid Deloitte $166,000 for a report on merging three Perth universities, and the report said generative AI had helped with its research.
The three universities are the University of Western Australia, Curtin University and Murdoch University. The government of Western Australia wants to merge them. It asked Deloitte to estimate the costs and benefits. Deloitte is a consultancy firm. All figures here are in Australian dollars.
The report contained a statement about its own methods. It said generative AI was used to “support the collation of research, synthesis of information and editorial proofing”. Editorial proofing is the step that finds the errors.
The Australian Financial Review then examined the references. The Financial Review is a national business newspaper. It found three citations that appeared to name the wrong study authors. Two references did not appear to reflect the studies they cited. One link pointed to an “entirely different” journal article.
The Financial Review said the errors bore “the hallmarks of artificial intelligence mistakes”. Guardian Australia then examined a reference to a World Health Organization report. The link carried a ChatGPT metadata tag. ChatGPT is a chatbot made by OpenAI. The tag indicated that the link came directly from ChatGPT.
A Deloitte spokeswoman said “minor referencing errors” had been “identified and are being addressed”. She said they did not affect the substantive findings. The state opposition called the report “AI slop”. The opposition is the largest party not in government.
The tertiary education minister is Tony Buti. He leads the merger proposal. He first described the errors as “typos”. He then said he would ask Deloitte to hand back some of its fee. “I’m angry with Deloitte. It should not have happened,” he said.
Guardian Australia then checked the sums in the appendix. One scenario merged Curtin and the University of Western Australia at high cost. Its two cost lines were $514m and $145m. They total $659m. The report gave the total as $399m.
The difference is $260m. That is 1,566 times the fee.
A second scenario merged all three universities at low cost. Its two cost lines were $396m and $116m. They total $512m. The report gave the total as $823m. The errors therefore ran in both directions, which is a kind of balance.
The report also referred repeatedly to the “Curtin University of Technology”. Curtin has not used that name since 2010. An act of the state parliament changed it in 2017. The report was about Curtin’s future.
The government’s Department of Energy and Economic Diversification has written to Deloitte. It asked for an “expedited” cost recovery. A government spokesperson said Deloitte will correct the errors and re-issue the report. Murdoch’s vice-chancellor, Andrew Deeks, wrote: “Another fail for Deloitte.” A vice-chancellor is the head of a university.
The Bureau files this as the second Deloitte report in the archive. The first is AIFoPa-2025-0002. That report disclosed its use of generative AI after the errors were found. This report disclosed it in advance. The disclosure has improved.