Earlier this year, University of Sydney academic Christopher Rudge unexpectedly created a costly headache for Deloitte Australia, simply by checking a few citations. While reading a new report from the international consulting company’s local firm, he stumbled across a reference to a book allegedly written by one of his colleagues at the University of Sydney, law professor Lisa Burton Crawford. He knew immediately that the book didn’t exist.This discovery eventually led to an investigation that forced Deloitte to refund $98,000 (AUD) to the Australian government, while bringing up pertinent questions about responsible AI use in professional services.GPTZero used our Citation Check to analyze the 234 page report and identified more than 30 issues out of the total 141 citations, including 19 hallucinations. You can see this table with all citations we found to be hallucinated, which were verified by a historian PhD expert on our team. Using GPTZero’s citation check would have saved ~$5000 per citation, all within minutes. If you're interested in learning more, you can reach out to our team here.The StoryThe Deloitte report in question was the result of a $440,000 (AUD) contract between the consulting firm and the Australian Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR). Published under the title Targeted Compliance Framework: Independent Review Final Report on July 4, 2025 (mirror), it reviewed the department’s system for imposing automated penalties on welfare recipients. After Rudge approached the Australian Financial Review, reporters confirmed that the Burton citation was only one of many fabricated quotes, case references, articles, and other sources,DEWR eventually identified more than 50 suspect citations in an internal review. In response to the controversy, Deloitte Australia updated the document to replace the problematic citations, acknowledged that the report had been produced with the help of AI, and apologized to DEWR. While Deloitte never admitted that the discussed citations were the result of generative AI, many observers (including Rudge) are convinced they are AI hallucinations.Deloitte also agreed to refund $98,000 (AUD) to the Australian government — this worked out to about $5000 per fabricated citation. However, when our GPTZero team ran the report through our Citation Check tool, we discovered we could have saved Deloitte a lot of money.The SolutionOur team used GPTZero’s Citation Check to analyze the report, just as we used it to check the MAHA report earlier this year. Citation Check is our solution to the epidemic of hallucinated sources threatening legal and scientific writing, journalism, and even textbooks. It helps both writers and readers by taking a complex job – verifying citations – and making it fast, accurate, and (relatively) pain-free.Citation Check uses our AI agent, trained in house, to detect any hallucinations in your document, including AI-generated citations. Citation Check can also evaluate the accuracy of each cited claim and can even identify important uncited claims before hunting down supporting evidence.The ReportDeloitte’s original version of the report contained 141 citations. Citation Check identified more than 30 issues with these citations, including 20 probable hallucinations. For example, this scan of Chapter 9 indicates that citation 89 is fake.GPTZero's citation check product in actionAfter scanning the report, we compared the results to a version labelled manually by an expert on our team. Table 1 includes all the citations that both Citation Check and our expert agreed were either fake or unavailable online. Table 2 includes sources our tool coded yellow, usually because the citation was flawed, but pointed to a real source. Table 3 includes several complicated cases that Citation Check coded green, but which were flagged by our expert.