A Canadian government-commissioned Deloitte healthcare report that cost one province nearly $1.6 million contains potentially AI-generated errors, marking the second country this year to fall victim to the consulting firm’s fact-checking shortcomings.
The errors—found in an investigation published Saturday by The Independent, a progressive Canadian news outlet covering the country’s easternmost province Newfoundland and Labrador—appear in a 526-page report that was disseminated by its government in May.
The report advised the then Liberal-led government’s Department of Health and Community Services on topics including virtual care, retention incentives, and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare workers during a time when the province’s healthcare sector is facing nurse and doctor staffing shortages.
The Deloitte report contained false citations, pulled from made up academic papers to draw conclusions for cost-effectiveness analyses, and cited real researchers on papers they hadn’t worked on, The Independent found. It even included fictional papers co-authored by researchers who said they had never worked together.
“Deloitte Canada firmly stands behind the recommendations put forward in our report,” a Deloitte Canada spokesperson told Fortune in a statement. “We are revising the report to make a small number of citation corrections, which do not impact the report findings. AI was not used to write the report; it was selectively used to support a small number of research citations.”
