The news of the week that Deloitte had somehow managed to get AI to invent references in a report, for which they harvested 400 thousand dollars, should be a warning for all of us.
What it means—Field Exercise
So, for this weekend, the Macrobusiness cognoscenti has a field exercise that everyone is to complete.
For a weekend insight into what it means, go first to the Australian Government Tendering site.
On the right-hand side under ‘Quick Links’, you will see an arrow to the right of ”reports’—click on that.
Then, on the page you land on, underneath ‘Contract Notice’, click on ‘Contract Notice Published‘
Then, underneath the heading ‘Contract Notice Published Criteria‘, select ‘All Active and Retired Agencies‘.
For ‘Date Range‘ select 1 January 2010 to 11 October 2025.
For ‘Date Type‘ select ‘Publish Date’.
Ignore ‘Category‘ and ‘Confidentiality‘ (for these are often heading to slip fibs to the general public).
Underneath those, you will find ‘Supplier Name‘ and ‘Supplier ‘ABN’—these are the fields we will extrapolate with.
For a warm up exercise, type ‘DELOITTE TOUCHE TOHMATSU‘ into the Supplier name field, and ignore the Supplier ABN field.
Ignore the ‘SON ID‘ Field
Press ‘Display Results‘ in orange at the bottom.
You will get something like this
That tells you that a company with the name DELOITTE TOUCHE TOHMATSU has been awarded $1.875 billion worth of contracts in 2514 separate contracts since January 2010.
From there, if you ‘Download Results‘, the spreadsheet you download will tell you what Commonwealth Government Agency, when, what category, and a bit of a description, plus start, end, and operation dates of any contracts.
These are all well worth a sift through if you have the time and inclination for such things.
But the one we want today is ‘Supplier ABN‘.
All those contracts awarded to DELOITTE TOUCHE TOHMATSU have the Supplier ABN of predominantly, but not solely—for reasons we shall come to—with the ABN number:-
74490121060
Be aware that the ‘Supplier ABN’ is formatted as text and not a number in that spreadsheet. There could well be a perfectly logical reason for that, but the effect here is to minimise the risk of anyone sorting the contracts by numbers and seeing if other numbers are being used by DELOITTE TOUCHE TOHMATSU.
Now at this point no doubt many of you are thinking, ‘One of the search fields was about Supplier ABN, wasn’t it?‘ – and it was.
So pop back to the page ‘Contract Notice Published‘ and search by ‘Supplier ABN‘ and not ‘Supplier ‘Name’—which in this case we know is DELOITTE TOUCHE TOHMATSU.
And when you run that search by ‘Supplier ABN‘ for number 74490121060 without anything in the ‘Supplier Name‘ field, a very interesting thing occurs.
Whereas Supplier Name tells us that DELOITTE TOUCHE TOHMATSU has received $1.875 billion from 2514 contracts since January 2010, Supplier ABN tells us that ABN number 74490121060 has had 2975 contracts worth $2.399 billion:
There are, of course, a million little informational bullshits that both governments and the large corporations contracting for their services may do to obscure the fiscal size of the relationship they have, and particularly for the people lined up to fund that relationship—you and people like you.
Those little informational tweaks can include state-registered subsidiaries with a different ABN, variations to the name, parent companies, a range of different names for a particular service and on and on.
As an example, if you run the above search with the name DELOITTE instead of DELOITTE TOUCHE TOHMATSU, you come up with 3554 contracts now worth $2.71 Billion:
At that point, you should think to yourself that there are large government outlays taking place with every state—contracting sites for NSW and Victorian governments have the information somewhere but hide their information too. Then there is the gloomy thought that the smaller the government, the less ability to have the specialists who can sort through this stuff starts to be a factor too.
Back to DELOITTE
But to go back to the initial genesis of this piece, someone has charged the Australian public circa $400k for a report that was ostensibly about compliance and AI in systems use, when AI somehow managed to invent quotes and references instead of highly paid consultants.
The organization that has been found out has received billions of dollars’ worth of contracts from the Commonwealth Government and is presumably a beneficiary of considerably more from state and local governments. It certainly isn’t the only organisation in that field with Michael West and other organisations regularly pointing out that large accounting and auditing firms, business consultancies, and recruitment firms harvest billions of taxpayer-funded dollars annually via government contracts.
At this point, we should recognise that virtually every large contractor providing significant services likely shares similar questionable practices. In addition to your large accounting and auditing firms, there will be a load of logistics and building facilities contracts, a zillion more recruitment and temporary employment contracts, and then IT, office furniture, training, and consulting.
The federal government is the largest source of these outlays, which is why there should be a significant federal punishment for this action. That punishment should serve as a warning to all recipients of government contracts.
If a partial refund of the fee for a report that is about the use of AI in the government integrity process by a firm that has had contracts worth thousands of times what that report is worth is acceptable, then Australians need to start thinking about having whatever the capacity is that they are outsourcing brought back inside.
Australians need integrity of information and they need integrity of decision-making based on that information. It is time to start setting standards.
If we are using AI to inform ourselves, we should be using AI to ensure a nationally accessible register of all government—Commonwealth, state, and local—outlays, including contracting organisations, counterparties, volumes, and purpose for contracts.
In a country reliant on government outlays for circa 80% of its employment creation over the last three years, we should expect nothing less. Because for sure the employment growth will be far inferior to the margins and returns of the contracts we as taxpayers are lined up for.
And DELOITTE should be receiving time without government contracts for this action.
Edit: For those who have contacted me asking for comparisons from the same site
PricewaterhouseCoopers (Name not ABN) – returns a figure between 1 January 2010 and 11 October 2025 of
Contracts – 2618 and AUD value 1,868 Billion
KPMG – 5104 and 3.632 Billion
Ernst & Young – 2144 and 2.078 Billion
and a search for the Supplier Name Hays brings up 23541 contracts and 3.975 Billion