Wellington mayor Andrew Little has said in a radio interview that a significant amount of a $435,000 Deloitte report on the council\u2019s staffing levels was written by artificial intelligence, as the report’s credibility comes under increasing scrutiny.<\/p>\n
By Justin Wong of Local Democracy Reporting<\/p>\n
The Future Fit P\u014dneke report released last November claimed the council had 330 excess staff, but it later emerged Deloitte had double-counted current employees with vacant roles and relied on three-year old employment data from the Taxpayers\u2019 Union.<\/p>\n
In a Tuesday interview on Newstalk ZB, Little said \u201clarge chunks\u201d of the report were \u201cwritten by AI\u201d, but did not elaborate on the scale or which sections were produced that way.<\/p>\n
He said the report offered some useful insight \u2013 particularly its finding that the council\u2019s contract management systems were a \u201cdisaster\u201d \u2013 but described the remainder as \u201cfrankly, just a waste of time\u201d.<\/p>\n
Little\u2019s office referred a request for comment from Local Democracy Reporting to a paper submitted to a council meeting last week, which detailed further errors in the report \u2013 including Deloitte counting all employees at their full-time salary, regardless of the hours they worked, and overstating staffing expensed by $21.5 million.<\/p>\n
The firm also assumed roles with “project” in the title were a duplicate job.<\/p>\n
“The incorrect data usage means that the assumptions used to construct the recommendation to reduce the organisation by 330 FTE were inherently flawed,” the council papers said.<\/p>\n
A more accurate number would be 284, but that did not take other potential incorrect assumptions into account.<\/p>\n
Deloitte has been asked for comment following Little\u2019s Tuesday interview, but the firm has previously stood by the report.<\/p>\n
“Deloitte uses a range of tools and technologies across its work, including AI-enabled tools where appropriate,” a spokesperson said last week, adding a human needed to sign off any analysis, findings and conclusions.<\/p>\n
“We are satisfied that the report’s conclusions reflect the work performed and the professional judgement applied throughout the engagement.”<\/p>\n
\u2013 Local Democracy Reporting (LDR) is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wellington mayor Andrew Little has said in a radio interview that a significant amount of a $435,000 Deloitte…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":587882,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,135,145,40,38,41,39,52],"class_list":["post-587881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-technology","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-wellington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587881\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/587882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}