iTutorGroup: the hiring software that rejected by birthday
Recruiting software was programmed to automatically reject women 55 and older and men 60 and older. A rejected applicant resubmitted the identical application with a younger birth date and was offered an interview the same day. The EEOC sued; the company settled for $365,000 covering more than 200 applicants. The discrimination was not an emergent model behavior. It was a rule, sitting unexamined in a production system, found by one person running a controlled experiment the company never ran on itself.
What the verified record says.
- Organizations
- iTutorGroup; US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
- When
- 2020Resolved August 2023
- Failure class
- Discriminatory decision discriminatory-decision
- Discovered by
- The party it harmed victim Not caught by the organization running the AI
- Missing control
- Accuracy monitoring in production. Measuring what the system actually does after launch: error rates, bias, drift against outcomes. Full definition and the other incidents in this group → Watch this kind of control catch a planted failure →
- What would have caught it
- A test that submits identical applications differing only in a protected attribute, run before the software screens a single applicant.
- Sources
-
- EEOC primary
- Verification
- Confirmed: the claims held as first researched. The discovery detail is in the EEOC complaint: a rejected applicant resubmitted the identical application with a younger birth date and was offered an interview. 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 →