Deloitte's $166,000 WA University Merger Report Contains AI-Hallucinated References and $260M+ Arithmetic Errors

The Western Australian government is seeking reimbursement from Deloitte after a $166,000 feasibility study on merging three state universities turned out to contain hallucinated references and arithmetic errors running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. In one scenario, Deloitte calculated two costs totalling $659m and wrote down $399m — a $260m gap. In another, figures adding up to $512m were recorded as $823m, off by $311m. One URL cited in the report carried a ChatGPT metadata tag, and the university now known as Curtin University was referred to throughout by a name it hasn't used since 2010. Deloitte had previously described the errors as "minor."

Deloitte acknowledged using generative AI "to support the collation of research, synthesis of information and editorial proofing." The WA government called the errors "extremely disappointing" while the tertiary education minister first called them "typos," then said he was angry. Murdoch University's vice-chancellor, whose institution opposed the merger, published an op-ed responding to the report with: "Another fail for Deloitte."