{"id":315626,"date":"2025-11-30T03:24:37","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T03:24:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/315626\/"},"modified":"2025-11-30T03:24:37","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T03:24:37","slug":"deloitte-breaks-silence-on-n-l-healthcare-report-the-independent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/315626\/","title":{"rendered":"Deloitte breaks silence on N.L. healthcare report \u2013 The Independent"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Deloitte Canada headquarters in Toronto. Rayshono\/Wikimedia Commons.<\/p>\n

Deloitte Canada says it \u201cfirmly stands behind the recommendations put forward\u201d in a healthcare report it produced for the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador that included errors generated by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

One of the world\u2019s largest accounting firms, Deloitte broke its silence Tuesday, four days after The Independent first reported<\/a> the inclusion of fake citations in the $1.6-million Health Human Resources Report the company produced for the province to help address its health authority\u2019s staffing crisis. <\/p>\n

The firm also said in its statement, sent to The Independent without a name attached and attributed to a \u201cDeloitte Canada spokesperson,\u201d that it is \u201crevising the report to make a small number of citation corrections, which do not\u00a0impact\u00a0the report findings.\u201d<\/p>\n

The anonymous spokesperson also said AI \u201cwas not used to\u202fwrite\u202fthe report,\u201d and that it was \u201cselectively used to support a small number of research citations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those citations reference research articles which don\u2019t exist but were used to support claims related to virtual care, monetary recruitment and retention incentives, recruitment strategies, and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare workers. In at least two cases, the citations also named actual researchers who did not author the fabricated articles.<\/p>\n

One of the citations was used to substantiate a claim that a group of researchers \u201cfound\u201d registered respiratory therapists working in acute care during the COVID-19 pandemic \u201creported increased workload and stress levels due to the pandemic.\u201d Deloitte\u2019s report\u2014still available on the government\u2019s website\u2014claims the article is titled \u201cThe impact of COVID-19 on respiratory therapist workload and stress levels in Canada\u201d and was published in the Canadian Journal of Respiratory Therapy.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday a representative from the Canadian Society of Respiratory Therapists<\/a>, which owns the Canadian Journal of Respiratory Therapy, contacted The Independent after reading the Nov. 22 story to confirm the article named in Deloitte\u2019s report \u201chas not been published in the Canadian Journal of Respiratory Therapy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jason Nickerson, the Canadian Society of Respiratory Therapists\u2019 senior director of public policy, also said he and the organization \u201chave no further information on the veracity or origins of this citation and were not involved or consulted in the drafting of this report.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following the revelations, the province\u2019s New Democratic Party called on the government to implement regulations around AI use in government reports. On Monday Premier Tony Wakeham\u2019s office told The Independent it had asked the Department of Government Services to \u201cundertake a review of what guidelines should be put in place to stop this from happening in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month Deloitte was caught using AI in a similar scandal in Australia, where the firm refunded the Australian government after a researcher found fake citations in a government-commissioned report. A new version of that report was later published with a disclosure that the firm had used Microsoft\u2019s AI language system Azure OpenAI in the report\u2019s creation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are fully responsible for the quality of our work, including the accuracy of report citations, and are committed to\u00a0continually evolving our governance and practices around the use of AI and emerging technologies to help ensure accuracy,\u00a0transparency\u00a0and accountability,\u201d the anonymous Deloitte Canada spokesperson\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

Deloitte Canada has not answered questions from The Independent about whether it will issue a full or partial refund to the province and CEO Anthony Viel has not publicly addressed the matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Deloitte Canada headquarters in Toronto. Rayshono\/Wikimedia Commons. Deloitte Canada says it \u201cfirmly stands behind the recommendations put forward\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[62,276,49,48,66514,84,392,714],"class_list":["post-315626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-deloitte","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}