Senate publishes false KPMG and Deloitte claims invented by AI
The senate inquiry into the integrity of the Australian consulting industry has taken an integrity hit of its own, with published submissions proposing reform having relied on false claims conjured by artificial intelligence.
With seemingly no end to the scandals engulfing the Australian Big Four accounting and consulting firms, KPMG is now under fire for being complicit in the 7-Eleven wage-theft graft which forced the resignation of a number of its partners, while Deloitte has been accused of advising NAB on its scheme to defraud customers of millions of dollars – except that neither of those things ever occurred.
Rather, they were conjured up by artificial intelligence – generative artificial intelligence to be more precise.
Yet, unfortunately for local lawmakers, the imaginary events weren’t just spat out and deleted following a hypothetical ChatGPT prompt, but submitted as case studies to the ongoing Senate inquiry into the Australian consulting industry, before then being published under parliamentary privilege.
The accountancy academics who lent on Google Bard AI to support their recommendations of regulatory reform have since issued an apology.
However, the comical blunder has presented the Big Four with a golden opportunity to get one back over their tormentors in the Senate. Here, it’s fair to say that the public inquiry – launched in the wake of the PwC government tax scandal – has been marked by a high level of hostility toward the consulting industry, and in particular the Big Four. KPMG has been embarrassed several times alone, including in having been caught out ‘mapping’.
“The livelihoods of the more than 10,000 people who work at KPMG can be affected when obviously incorrect information is put on the public record and reported as fact,” KPMG’s chief Andrew Yates wrote in an indignant response to the Senate joint committee. “We are deeply concerned and disappointed that AI has been relied upon, without comprehensive fact-checking, for a submission to such an important parliamentary inquiry.”
For the record, KPMG (not necessarily an audit cleanskin at the international level; seehere, here and here), evidently had nothing to do with 7-Eleven outside of a data integration project, and never served as auditor of the Commonwealth Bank – with which the firm was also in cahoots with in another financial planning scandal concocted by the creative AI tool. Indeed, not a single non-existent partner was ever fired over the fictional affairs.
Meanwhile, Deloitte, which in addition to the ‘NAB financial planning scandal’ was also wrongly stated to have been sued for failed audits by the liquidators the collapsed building company Probuild (Deloitte were in fact administrators) and falsely accused of fudging the accounts of cake-maker Patisserie Valerie (audited by Grant Thornton in the United Kingdom), was more reserved in its response, although with a suspicion the firm was secretly revelling in the error.
“Deloitte supports academic freedom and constructive discourse in relation to those matters currently before the committee, however, it considers that it is important to have factually incorrect information corrected,” general council Tala Bennett said in a statement, making a quiet claim the higher ground. “It is disappointing that this has occurred, and we look forward to understanding the committee’s approach to correcting this information.”
In a statement released by a group of academics that conducted the analysis shortly after the revelations became public, they have offered an unreserved apology to the Big Four consultancy firms after admitting they used artificial intelligence to make false allegations of serious wrongdoing.
