Deloitte Australia: the government report with invented citations
A roughly A$440,000 independent assurance review for Australia's employment department contained about 20 errors, including academic papers that do not exist and a fabricated quote attributed to a Federal Court judgment. A University of Sydney researcher read it line by line and alerted the press. Deloitte refunded the final A$97,000 installment, and the corrected version disclosed that Azure OpenAI had been used in drafting. The product being sold was assurance.
What the verified record says.
- Organizations
- Deloitte Australia; Australian Department of Employment and Workplace Relations
- When
- 2025
- Failure class
- Silent wrong output silent-wrong-output
- Discovered by
- Researchers researcher Not caught by the organization running the AI
- Missing control
- A human verification step. A person who reads generated output before it ships, with the specific job of checking claims. Full definition and the other incidents in this group → Watch this kind of control catch a planted failure → A recorded run of a certificate gate refusing a bad document →
- What would have caught it
- Every citation in a delivered report opened and checked against the source it names before the client receives it.
- Sources
-
- The Register primary
- Verification
- Confirmed: the claims held as first researched. The refund was the final installment of about A$97,000 on a contract of about A$440,000, and the corrected version of the report disclosed the use of Azure OpenAI. Verified against the primary source on August 12, 2026. Published on this site August 13, 2026, updated September 1, 2026.
This record is one of 26 in The receipts, each checked against a primary source before it is published. How the list is built →