A new government AI chatbot designed to help people navigate public services is giving misleading answers, a leading tax expert has said.
The gov.uk chat tool, which launches officially on Friday, is being promoted as “the most comprehensive government-built chat tool in the world”.
It allows users to ask questions about government services instead of calling a hotline or scrolling through the 80,000 web pages of the gov.uk network.
The chatbot is meant to provide users with faster and easier access to government support
However, Dan Neidle, founder of Tax Policy Associates, tested the chatbot for The Times and found it wanting on some tax answers.
He asked the chatbot: “I earn £99,000. I am currently claiming £6,000 of tax-free childcare. If I get a £1,000 pay increase, what happens?”
It replied that he would “still be eligible for tax-free childcare. The scheme does not have an upper income limit that would affect you at this level,” and then went on to say he could continue to claim up to £2,000 per child.
Neidle said: “There’s a famous upper limit of £100,000, after which you lose everything. Given most people at that level have £500+ of interest income, the gov.uk answer is in practice going to horribly mislead people.”
The government said that the answer was technically correct as at £100,000 the person is still eligible.
Neidle also asked: “I earn £30,000. I just made £1,300 selling two old MacBooks on eBay. Do I need to call HMRC to declare this and pay tax on it?”
The chatbot responded: “You may need to tell HMRC about the £1,300 you made from selling your MacBooks. Whether you need to pay tax depends on if you made a profit (sold them for more than you paid) and if that profit is over the tax-free allowance for capital gains tax [CGT].”
Neidle said about this response: “That’s stupid. A MacBook isn’t subject to CGT.”
The government said in response that the chat service is designed to provide information rather than advice and lets the user know they may need to tell HMRC about this income.
Neidle said: “The chatbot certainly gives the impression it provides advice. If all it did was summarise guidance then it would be safer.”
He added that he asked the chatbot a technical question about “hybrid mismatch” rules “and it attempted to advise and it got it wrong”.
When asked about “hybrid mismatch” rules the chatbot “got it wrong”
The new service is a central element of the government’s drive to modernise public services with the help of artificial intelligence.
In an interview with The Times before the testing, Ian Murray, the minister for digital government and data, said the chatbot is going to be “hugely accurate” as “it’s been tested to essentially destruction … and has been hugely valuable already in its soft launch”.
In testing the chatbot was said to be “90 per cent accurate”, meaning that one in ten answers didn’t meet a threshold where the response had to be fully complete and match official guidance in every detail. Murray said this was “much more accurate than the human context”.
The government also claims that its chatbot consistently performs better than other AI tools “because it only uses official gov.uk information”.
Neidle said the chatbot refused to answer simple questions like this one: “My partner has no income. I earn £65,000 and we have three children. Do I have to pay back some of my child benefit through the high income child benefit charge (HICBC)?” He said it was a “really important question people would want to know, and it’s not complicated”.
However, Neidle said the chatbot did answer this question correctly: “I live full time on a permanently moored houseboat. Do I need to pay council tax?”
“Yes, you need to pay council tax if you live full time on a permanently moored houseboat,” it replied.
Neidle has been investigating Zack Polanski after The Times revealed the Green Party leader did not pay council tax when he lived on a houseboat.
Murray said one of the objectives behind the chatbot was to free up government call centre time to deal with more complex queries in person.
When asked whether he could guarantee there would be no job cuts in call centres as a result of the technology, he responded: “There’s nothing in the strategy beyond what’s in the spending review the government departments have signed up to. Obviously, there’s an efficiency target across the whole of government.
“The spending review across all government departments obviously sets out where headcounts are to go. Permanent secretaries, individual government departments are working on those but that is not the purpose of setting up this gov.uk chat.
“This is about providing a service to the public, making it easier for them to find the information they need, giving them more accurate information and freeing up the call centre time.”
The chatbot is part of the gov.uk app and can be downloaded from app stores. Users will need a One Login account.