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Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report

464 points by fforflo 1y ago

dhotson 1y ago
Good to know.. if you defraud the Australian government and misuse tax payers money... the consequences are: partial refund.
- nullc 1y ago
  That's how it went for Craig Wright, famous Satoshi imposter-- prior to his bitcoin infamy he stole millions via fraudulent GST refunds and fraudulent refundable R&D tax credits then got caught attempting tens of millions more. He fled Australia, repaid part of the fraud and has generally been living it up elsewhere in the world with no further consequences from his tax fraud.
  - an0malous 1y ago
    If you’re going to commit crimes, be ambitious. Theft, murder, and lying all have lesser punishments the bigger you go with them because you get grouped with the investor class that does these things all the time and has immunity from severe consequences
    - nullc 1y ago
      It really is the case-- Post Covid Wright's style of GST fraud[1] went pretty much viral and they did start heavy enforcement actions, but their videos are full of raiding the homes of people living in public housing who stole a few thousand. I guess if you stole enough to pay for a fancy law firm like Wright did, you're much better off. [Wright's whole Satoshi cosplay seems to have resulted from this fraud because when the ATO did catch him they asked the obvious question: "Where did the money you were supposedly spending come from in the first place?" Bitcoin was just hitting the news bigtime then so he claimed to be an early bitcoin miner, but the amounts in question were so large that he needed to eventually extend it to being Satoshi to try to make it make sense.] [1] in AU instead of not charging resellers sales tax businesses just apply to have their sales tax paid refunded, and it more or less works on the honor system. So you can spin up a bunch of on-paper businesses, make some sham sales between them-- the buying side claims the GST refund, the selling side just goes out of business without ever paying the sales tax.
- bearjaws 1y ago
  To be fair this is pretty much how it has to work. Imagine one rogue employee out of 10 commits fraud, do you get all your money back? No you get the billable hours + damages for the fraud. If it worked the other way contracts would be longer than the actual work to be performed.
oytis 1y ago
Can someone explain to me how and why consulting works? If a man had no real skills except giving advice left and right, he would be considered a loser. Now make it a company, and corporations and governments queue up for their advice. Wouldn't your own employees be in a better position to give you advice than people who know nothing of your business and who's only skills are googling and making presentations?
- brador 1y ago
  When things go wrong you can blame the consultants so you don’t get fired. Same reason all workplace PCs are Windows.
- juttern 1y ago
  [dead]
- flypps 1y ago
  Taking responsibility so you can blame someone for your decisions and to find 'logical' Arguments for your decisions after you already made them but don't want to look stupid.
- raesene9 1y ago
  I think that's not quite the way consulting should, and to some extent does, work. The ideal goal of consultancies like Deloitte's is that they hire a small number of people with experience and combine them with a larger number of young bright people and have them come in to review and advise organizations. The people with experience (so who have worked in that field before) direct the engagement and the leg work is done by the juniors, producing a report for the customer. As to why companies would choose to use consultancies, there's a variety of reasons, some good, some less than good. - Outside perspective & experience. The consultancy has done engagements with other companies in your field and can provide that experience. - Neutral point of view. The consultancy should be neutral to any internal politics within the organization. - Appeal to authority. Many times organizations use consultancies to provide evidence to external stakeholders that the thing they want to do is the right thing. Now that's not to say that it always (or even often) works out that way, but in theory at least, there are some not terrible reasons.
d--b 1y ago
Consulting firms are total crooks. Before they used AI, they used just-out-of-grad-school interns... People who've never work in consulting have no idea how crazy the gap is between the price of reports like these and the salary that's paid to the people actually writing them.
- rhetocj23 1y ago
  Well that’s the core idea - build an environment of hungry folks who don’t quite know how the world works and suck all that you can out of them.
  - yupyupyups 1y ago
    That's something worker unions can help with, by enlightening members what a reasonable salary is. These consultancy companies often underpay their consultants. Sometimes the salary is egregiously low with the excuse that they are providing some kind of preparatory education for some length of time. The work of that same consultant that is "in education" is then heavily overcharged for. I've heard some horror stories with these. tl;dr Make use of a good union or org to find out what a good salary is and don't get yourself ripped off.
- yupyupyups 1y ago
  >Consulting firms are total crooks. Amen to that. They rip off the consolutant and the customer.
tallytarik 1y ago
Our government has been paying Deloitte & co. to produce slop for years before AI was being used to generate said slop. Can we get a refund for all of the others too?
kakacik 1y ago
AI is a trap too sweet to ignore. Its ruining young folks future by removing the hard effort part of learning, which then builds more resistant character which is more able to wade through daily crap of our adult lives. Some sort of patience with life, its not a skill that comes on its own. And clearly its (almost) everywhere, including companies who should do and know better. AI will make humanity more lazy seems to be the conclusion. Well fear not, those few who will not be lured by it will stand tall and far apart, and can achieve a lot more professionally and personally in crowds utterly reliant on their tiny little llm helpers. We all choose daily how our lives will look like from now on.
- rhetocj23 1y ago
  Indeed. This is something that isn’t said a lot. A person who has been in an industry for 10+ years will be fine from exposure to LLM’s. Because they already built the discipline. Frankly if you’re an expert I don’t see where the value of an LLM fits. People keep talking about productivity increases. But that just speaks to the quantity. What about the quality? It’s tiresome to see people who just don’t get this.
  - emseetech 1y ago
    Not to mention lacking the requisite knowledge whether the information is legitimate or not. I stay slightly above my knowledge. I can ask it about concurrency patterns in Go because I can spot the bs. But quantum physics or molecular biology? It could tell me anything that "sounds" reasonable but is completely wrong and I wouldn't know.
- hansmayer 1y ago
  [dead]
emil-lp 1y ago
> “The updates made in no way impact or affect the substantive content, findings and recommendations in the report,” it stated in the amended version. Well, then ...
- breakingcups 1y ago
  It then continued: "I'm sorry, but as an AI language model..."
windex 1y ago
The number of people managing people managing people who actually do the work is quite high in some of these firms. The partners are rolling in cash, while the actual consultants are hoping to climb the ladder. In some geographies, this has created cliques that keep each other in positions and they make money together while strangling any up and coming competition from below.
sigwinch 1y ago
In theory, an official with skin in the game can use a consultant to learn how to avoid mistakes. We don’t have AI smart-enough to speak about new kinds of mistakes (yet). So it seems to me that the public official should be using AI more than the consultant, for now: - Find prior consulting products (reports) relevant to my situation. Maybe Deloitte produced a great piece of public advice back in 2007 and AI can style-transfer it to my set of 2025 vocabulary and assumptions. - What would an average citizen, with access to AI, expect me to do on their behalf and communicate back? - I meet with a consultant and provide AI with a transcript. It should research a reading list for us.
ultim8k 1y ago
Most of the time gov, orgs and companies don't listen to their in-house engineers but will pay $$$ to some consulting firm, only to confirm the same thing or just to show that "they are taking actions towards the solution". In some cases there is distrust from management on in-house employees or in some other cases they want to show quick results without distracting their teams from their planned tasks. Of course there are the cases that managers have personal motives, either to add an extra (useless) achievement on their list or even worse to get referral fee or presents from the external consultancy.
- sigwinch 1y ago
  That’s a kind of due diligence theater. In particular, managers want to know what their competitors’ engineers would recommend, which is the best static advice consultants say they can give.
- cpa 1y ago
  The people working inside the company may be both judge and party to the issue, it’s not always a bad idea to call in consultants. Do you prefer independent and somewhat misinformed or stakeholder to the issue and knowledgeable?
  - jjk166 1y ago
    If you can't trust your people, why are they your people? The consultants are going to get the story from your people anyways (even if they do their own data collection, your people are going to tell them where to look), so it's not like you're actually eliminating the bias, you're just obfuscating it. You hire consultants when obfuscation is the point - it's not Jim from down the hall saying this, its the consultants. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for obfuscation, but it's always some variation on "so and so needs to hear this, just not from me."
- anal_reactor 1y ago
  What if your in-house engineers are morons but you need to have one particular project done correctly. I don't understand the glorification of normal engineers - quite often they're normal people drawn from normal distribution, with all consequences of that.
zwnow 1y ago
Another win for AI! /s
jack_riminton 1y ago
As someone who did an MBA and was groomed to be a Consultant and then repented (now a software engineer) you have to understand that the customer of a consultancy project is an exec. 1. The exec has been charged with exploring a new product space, a potential M&A deal, more vertical integration etc etc 2. The exec needs a gauge on the "size of the prize", is this thing worth doing? roughly how will it be done? how long etc. 3. The exec probably already has a rough idea or gut feeling about one such option 4. The consultants produce something that usually supports the gut feeling, other times it will suggest alternatives and provide some facts and figures to support
- jwx48 1y ago
  Bingo. Therein lies the difference between a “client” and a “customer”.
- sigwinch 1y ago
  Years ago, I was introduced to a “what would Elon do?” assistant. Execs want to know what their (current or hypothetical) competition would do given their decision-support data. But they also want to know what a consult-assistant cutout would know. (This was long before his political achievements)
- deaux 1y ago
  This entirely depends on industry and geography. I've worked with big companies where the customers of consultants were effectively middle management, several layers removed from execs.
  - jack_riminton 1y ago
    True, they are called the "Hidden Client", any good consultant will be able to essentially do intelligence gathering on who that is and what they want, because it will be one exec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vMdZhIfPjs&list=PLtuDeBJEKi7yRqt-jvxV7Yt_dVlRMJ-bw&index=3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vMdZhIfPjs&list=PLtuDeBJEKi...
- coffeebeqn 1y ago
rimbo789 1y ago
Are there any organizations on earth that, for their economic size, produce so little value to society than the Big 4?
DrScientist 1y ago
While we are on the topic of listing problems with consultants/outsourcing - another potential problem is the A team/ B team switch. During initial engagement you are often talking to somebody who appears to actually know their stuff - you hire them and find that this knowledgable person has moved on to the next big sales, and you've got the B or C team.
- DrScientist 1y ago
  To balance that with a positive comment - one of the reasons for going with a consultant/outsourcing is if you have a big one/off type project that you can't resource internally with perms. So the choice is trying to hire a bunch of individual contractors and forge them into a team, or hire a pre-built team for a period of time [1] [1] Sometimes it's sold as a re-built team - but in reality it might be hired in exactly the same way by the consultancy....
  - Gigachad 1y ago
    I just don’t see how this happens for government work though. Surely they have enough year round work to hire people in house for it.
    - codebje 1y ago
      The Australian federal government goes through waves of "reducing the size of the public service" by firing and/or capping full-time hires, but the work's still there to be done so contractors get the gig.
      - Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
        This is the thing. Its much less expensive to have these sorts of knowledge employees on government staff who just do this sort of work all the time, but governments prefer to spend more (much much more) on contractors. I suspect its partly because they are always wanting to announce down-sizing initiatives to appease the right, but I think more cynically, its because contractors will more reliably give them the 'right answer' than career civil servants and there's also the potential for kickbacks. Some of those profits paid to contractor companies might find their way back into campaign contributions.
DrScientist 1y ago
In the UK there is a bit of a problem with a revolving door between government and the big consultancy firms. The most egregious example of this is where the big accountancy firms offer political parties help in formulating tax policy and once it's enacted then go around charging companies for their expertise on how to comply/avoid the new rules.
emmelaich 1y ago
Not unrelated, but the Albanese govt spending way too much on consultants. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloitte-to-pay-money-back-to-albanese-government-after-using-ai-in-440000-report https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloi... https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/labor-vowed-to-crack-down-on-consultants-but-spending-is-going-up-20250724-p5mhku.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/labor-vowed-to-crack...
- HelloUsername 1y ago
  > https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloitte-to-pay-money-back-to-albanese-government-after-using-ai-in-440000-report https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloi... Why did you include the same article that you're posting on?
  - emmelaich 1y ago
    Oops. I'm pretty sure I had a much older article but must've fouled up my copy'n'paste. But while I'm here .. https://retractionwatch.com/2024/03/04/kpmg-government-report-on-research-integrity-makes-up-reference-involving-retraction-watch-founders/ https://retractionwatch.com/2024/03/04/kpmg-government-repor... "KPMG government report on research integrity makes up reference involving Retraction Watch founders" An August 2023 report on research integrity by consulting firm KPMG, commissioned by an Australian government agency, contains a made-up reference, Retraction Watch has discovered.
- JohnKemeny 1y ago
  The Albanese government is the sitting federal government of Australia, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of the Labor Party.
alexdoesstuff 1y ago
This is primarily a story of a failure to supervise the creation of the report, rather than anything related to AI. The role of the outsourced consultancy in such a project is to make sure the findings withstand public scrutiny. They clearly failed on this. It's quite shocking that the only consequence is a partial refund rather than a review of any current and future engagements with the consultancy due to poor performance. There shouldn't be a meaningful difference if the error in the report is minor or consequential for the finding, or if it is introduced by poorly used AI or a caffeinated up consultant in a late-night session.
JCM9 1y ago
CEOs keep taking (mostly misguided) about how GenAI will replace their people. The thing they miss, and this highlights, is that customers will also expect to pay far less for GenAI produced workloads, which likely more than eliminates any cost savings. Congrats clueless CEO… you’re now selling a worse product at lower margins. Success!
- sammorrowdrums 1y ago
  Relatedly, I think that success in post-AI business will be about doing more with the same or more people, not the same with less. Like you say, the AI part reduces the value and increases the availability of anything automated, so competing by trying to fire the most people to do keep doing the same job is simply not the game of anyone wanting their business to survive. You have to provide scale and quality that was out of reach before and is now table stakes (whenever now is for a given industry).
- trollbridge 1y ago
  This particular report concerned paying benefits (or not paying them) to unemployed people trying to find work - in other words, the very people who allegedly will be losing their jobs to AI.
- favflam 1y ago
  Just to add to this, customers are paying for a human to take responsibility for getting a job done. An amorphous "AI" cannot take responsibility and therefore does not merit the funds being spent on things like this report.
- Hoasi 1y ago
  "We can drive the value of a service towards zero and create additional value at the same time," was the thinking here.
  - figassis 1y ago
    I think you mean "We can drive the cost of a service towards zero and create additional value at the same time," was the thinking here. Don't think they realized they'd also be driving the value to zero.
moron4hire 1y ago
I've been a consultant for most of the last 20 (actually come to think of it, 25) years. Even did a brief stint at Deloitte. There is a lot of prejudice against consulting. Places like Deloitte, Accenture, are some of the largest companies in the world, so when they fuck up (which they seem previously designed to do, Deloitte was the quest job I've ever had), they fuck up big and very visibly. But there is a super long tail of consultancies that are basically mom-and-pop businesses offering expertise that other small and medium sized businesses can't afford to keep on staff 100% of the time. It's not just management consulting, there is a lot of consulting for execution in a wide variety of areas. We do our jobs and go away quietly and someone else gets to take the credit. That's pretty much the nature of consulting. So you never hear about it. You just get the sound bites about McKinsey or whoever charging millions to tell NYC "use garbage cans".
- ctippett 1y ago
  Funnily enough, in Australia a lot of those "mum and pop" consultancies (the successful ones at least) are getting slurped up by the likes of Cognizant and co.
  - heisenbit 1y ago
    This may be more related to buying contacts than buying expertise.
    - moron4hire 1y ago
      Yeah, because there's no IP, the MBAs don't see any "company" to buy. As a small consultancy owner, you're basically hoping you can sell the contracts when you're ready to retire.
trollbridge 1y ago
For a bit of background, this report concerned a problematic IT system that was incorrectly sending life-ruining fines to people for not meeting their requirements to apply for so many jobs, accept jobs, etc. whilst on government assistance. The fines came in the form of a judgment debt so people would literally have a debt bailiff show up and start carting their property away. Due to a seriously flawed IT system, this even happened to people who weren't on any government benefits at all. So, a report gets commissioned that a company like Deloitte gets paid $440k for, and then they cheat and use AI to generate it, complete with more errors. Imagine what would happen if they retained Deloitte next to build the system. I foresee another repeat of the Fujitsu Royal Mail scandal.
- gdulli 1y ago
  You don't have to imagine: https://cybernews.com/news/rhode-island-deloitte-data-breach/ https://cybernews.com/news/rhode-island-deloitte-data-breach...
- chris_wot 1y ago
  Why bother with going through Deloitte? Just go straight to OpenAI.
  - recursive 1y ago
    Dear OpenAI: Whose door should I break down today? There's no need to explain the reason, just give me the address.
    - orthecreedence 1y ago
      Sincerely, ICE
      - lostlogin 1y ago
        When humans want a scapegoat, the target is often chosen based on race. What will AI pick on?
SamLeBarbare 1y ago
Mix-up in title... it's not the Australian gov. Albanian mix-up, again, "arrêter de vous trump'er svp"
- Macha 1y ago
  Anthony _Albanese_ is the name of the current PM of Australia
thisisit 1y ago
Just today a consulting firm asked if they can use AI to generate user guides and documentation. I refused because of the hallucination issues. But got overruled by the end users - who are going to use these documents. They are convinced that AI will move things faster. When it comes time to using the document they are most likely going to feed the doc to AI and ask for summary and steps. Write document using AI and then read/summarize using AI.
paxys 1y ago
Knowing how these IT consulting firms work the AI-generated report was probably better quality that what they would have otherwise delivered.
sidcool 1y ago
I have worked in Consultancies for a long time. And many people here don't know what they do. Of course, there are bad apples that cheat. But a lot of good value in consultancies too! One evidence is that they are still around and earn billions.
- u_sama 1y ago
  I am legitimately curious what is the day to day work, and what is the consumer itch they itch for the companies. Could you develop on your experiences and what is the missing POV that makes so many HNers be against consultancies?
- ksajh 1y ago
  Being around and earning billions does not mean they're producing appropriate value
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
iamleppert 1y ago
I work in a building where Deloitte has an office. I see their employees riding the elevator and sometimes in other common areas. I just same here to say they are some of the most depressed and down-trodden group of people I have ever seen. They are noticeably different than other employees in the building. What's wrong with working at Deloitte that is does this to people?
- recursivecaveat 1y ago
  I think all the major public accounting firms are like that. Super hierarchical, dreary work, very corporate attitude. Everyone is there exclusively to hopefully climb to the top of the crab bucket. Imagine all the worst aspects of a FAANG company, but also all the peons are making a fraction of their tech compatriots.
boramalper 1y ago
Deloitte named a Leader in Worldwide Artificial Intelligence Services by IDC MarketScape https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/about/recognition/analyst-relations/deloitte-named-leader-in-worldwide-artificial-intelligence-services-by-idc-marketscape.html https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/about/recognition/analyst...
para_parolu 1y ago
I have such a bad experience with Deloitte when calculating my tax return. Almost like some lazy joke about capitalism. It’s a very dysfunctional company. They were calculating taxes in year when I moved from Europe to US and assigned two people, one for each country. For a month they were not able to make proper adjustments, until I realized they can’t talk to each other. One day I just started conference call from my phone to introduce them to each other and make sure they at least can talk. Nevertheless, in the end they made mistakes that cost me $5000. Luckily I was able to fix it with IRS two tears after
janalsncm 1y ago
I imagine that we will look back fondly on these days, when AI still is easy to spot because it hallucinates references. A non-existent reference is a slam dunk against an argument, but also technically easier to avoid. They will likely be much less common in the future. It’s much harder to counter the reasoning word salad that LLMs sometimes produce, where A doesn’t really connect to B but the text insists it does.
chanux 1y ago
I have seen this reported widely, discussed in a few forums. This will also do nothing to this company.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  Long term reputation is everything for these companies. Eventually their regulatory capture isn't strong enough if their purchases would lose reputation by buying Deloitte.
panick21_ 1y ago
Government need to have their own expertise. Specially in the anglo world, it seems governments are obsessed with not doing anything at all and are staffed mostly by a few admin staff. No innovation without 5 million $ to some lazy as outside consulting company.
apwell23 1y ago
why was the Albanese changed from the title?
- Huppie 1y ago
  Because it's confusing most likely. As others have pointed out: > Anthony _Albanese_ is the name of the current PM of Australia Which is probably why this Australian publication calls it the 'Albanese Government'. Not to be confused with the government of Albania.
sema4hacker 1y ago
Sounds like there will be a market for an AI tool that proofreads AI-generated documents. Or will that even be possible?
linhns 1y ago
With the quality of work Deloitte has been churning out recently, AI or humans do not matter anymore.
PieTime 1y ago
Management consult grift is reaching its inevitable end. They’ll cut out the management and insert AI consultants.

464 points by fforflo 1y ago

Good to know.. if you defraud the Australian government and misuse tax payers money... the consequences are: partial refund.

nullc 1y ago
That's how it went for Craig Wright, famous Satoshi imposter-- prior to his bitcoin infamy he stole millions via fraudulent GST refunds and fraudulent refundable R&D tax credits then got caught attempting tens of millions more. He fled Australia, repaid part of the fraud and has generally been living it up elsewhere in the world with no further consequences from his tax fraud.
- an0malous 1y ago
  If you’re going to commit crimes, be ambitious. Theft, murder, and lying all have lesser punishments the bigger you go with them because you get grouped with the investor class that does these things all the time and has immunity from severe consequences
  - nullc 1y ago
    It really is the case-- Post Covid Wright's style of GST fraud[1] went pretty much viral and they did start heavy enforcement actions, but their videos are full of raiding the homes of people living in public housing who stole a few thousand. I guess if you stole enough to pay for a fancy law firm like Wright did, you're much better off. [Wright's whole Satoshi cosplay seems to have resulted from this fraud because when the ATO did catch him they asked the obvious question: "Where did the money you were supposedly spending come from in the first place?" Bitcoin was just hitting the news bigtime then so he claimed to be an early bitcoin miner, but the amounts in question were so large that he needed to eventually extend it to being Satoshi to try to make it make sense.] [1] in AU instead of not charging resellers sales tax businesses just apply to have their sales tax paid refunded, and it more or less works on the honor system. So you can spin up a bunch of on-paper businesses, make some sham sales between them-- the buying side claims the GST refund, the selling side just goes out of business without ever paying the sales tax.
bearjaws 1y ago
To be fair this is pretty much how it has to work. Imagine one rogue employee out of 10 commits fraud, do you get all your money back? No you get the billable hours + damages for the fraud. If it worked the other way contracts would be longer than the actual work to be performed.

oytis 1y ago

Can someone explain to me how and why consulting works? If a man had no real skills except giving advice left and right, he would be considered a loser. Now make it a company, and corporations and governments queue up for their advice. Wouldn't your own employees be in a better position to give you advice than people who know nothing of your business and who's only skills are googling and making presentations?

brador 1y ago
When things go wrong you can blame the consultants so you don’t get fired. Same reason all workplace PCs are Windows.
juttern 1y ago
[dead]
flypps 1y ago
Taking responsibility so you can blame someone for your decisions and to find 'logical' Arguments for your decisions after you already made them but don't want to look stupid.
raesene9 1y ago
I think that's not quite the way consulting should, and to some extent does, work. The ideal goal of consultancies like Deloitte's is that they hire a small number of people with experience and combine them with a larger number of young bright people and have them come in to review and advise organizations. The people with experience (so who have worked in that field before) direct the engagement and the leg work is done by the juniors, producing a report for the customer. As to why companies would choose to use consultancies, there's a variety of reasons, some good, some less than good. - Outside perspective & experience. The consultancy has done engagements with other companies in your field and can provide that experience. - Neutral point of view. The consultancy should be neutral to any internal politics within the organization. - Appeal to authority. Many times organizations use consultancies to provide evidence to external stakeholders that the thing they want to do is the right thing. Now that's not to say that it always (or even often) works out that way, but in theory at least, there are some not terrible reasons.

d--b 1y ago

Consulting firms are total crooks. Before they used AI, they used just-out-of-grad-school interns... People who've never work in consulting have no idea how crazy the gap is between the price of reports like these and the salary that's paid to the people actually writing them.

rhetocj23 1y ago
Well that’s the core idea - build an environment of hungry folks who don’t quite know how the world works and suck all that you can out of them.
- yupyupyups 1y ago
  That's something worker unions can help with, by enlightening members what a reasonable salary is. These consultancy companies often underpay their consultants. Sometimes the salary is egregiously low with the excuse that they are providing some kind of preparatory education for some length of time. The work of that same consultant that is "in education" is then heavily overcharged for. I've heard some horror stories with these. tl;dr Make use of a good union or org to find out what a good salary is and don't get yourself ripped off.
yupyupyups 1y ago
>Consulting firms are total crooks. Amen to that. They rip off the consolutant and the customer.

tallytarik 1y ago

Our government has been paying Deloitte & co. to produce slop for years before AI was being used to generate said slop. Can we get a refund for all of the others too?

kakacik 1y ago

AI is a trap too sweet to ignore. Its ruining young folks future by removing the hard effort part of learning, which then builds more resistant character which is more able to wade through daily crap of our adult lives. Some sort of patience with life, its not a skill that comes on its own. And clearly its (almost) everywhere, including companies who should do and know better. AI will make humanity more lazy seems to be the conclusion. Well fear not, those few who will not be lured by it will stand tall and far apart, and can achieve a lot more professionally and personally in crowds utterly reliant on their tiny little llm helpers. We all choose daily how our lives will look like from now on.

rhetocj23 1y ago
Indeed. This is something that isn’t said a lot. A person who has been in an industry for 10+ years will be fine from exposure to LLM’s. Because they already built the discipline. Frankly if you’re an expert I don’t see where the value of an LLM fits. People keep talking about productivity increases. But that just speaks to the quantity. What about the quality? It’s tiresome to see people who just don’t get this.
- emseetech 1y ago
  Not to mention lacking the requisite knowledge whether the information is legitimate or not. I stay slightly above my knowledge. I can ask it about concurrency patterns in Go because I can spot the bs. But quantum physics or molecular biology? It could tell me anything that "sounds" reasonable but is completely wrong and I wouldn't know.
hansmayer 1y ago
[dead]

emil-lp 1y ago

> “The updates made in no way impact or affect the substantive content, findings and recommendations in the report,” it stated in the amended version. Well, then ...

breakingcups 1y ago
It then continued: "I'm sorry, but as an AI language model..."

windex 1y ago

The number of people managing people managing people who actually do the work is quite high in some of these firms. The partners are rolling in cash, while the actual consultants are hoping to climb the ladder. In some geographies, this has created cliques that keep each other in positions and they make money together while strangling any up and coming competition from below.

sigwinch 1y ago

In theory, an official with skin in the game can use a consultant to learn how to avoid mistakes. We don’t have AI smart-enough to speak about new kinds of mistakes (yet). So it seems to me that the public official should be using AI more than the consultant, for now: - Find prior consulting products (reports) relevant to my situation. Maybe Deloitte produced a great piece of public advice back in 2007 and AI can style-transfer it to my set of 2025 vocabulary and assumptions. - What would an average citizen, with access to AI, expect me to do on their behalf and communicate back? - I meet with a consultant and provide AI with a transcript. It should research a reading list for us.

ultim8k 1y ago

Most of the time gov, orgs and companies don't listen to their in-house engineers but will pay $$$ to some consulting firm, only to confirm the same thing or just to show that "they are taking actions towards the solution". In some cases there is distrust from management on in-house employees or in some other cases they want to show quick results without distracting their teams from their planned tasks. Of course there are the cases that managers have personal motives, either to add an extra (useless) achievement on their list or even worse to get referral fee or presents from the external consultancy.

sigwinch 1y ago
That’s a kind of due diligence theater. In particular, managers want to know what their competitors’ engineers would recommend, which is the best static advice consultants say they can give.
cpa 1y ago
The people working inside the company may be both judge and party to the issue, it’s not always a bad idea to call in consultants. Do you prefer independent and somewhat misinformed or stakeholder to the issue and knowledgeable?
- jjk166 1y ago
  If you can't trust your people, why are they your people? The consultants are going to get the story from your people anyways (even if they do their own data collection, your people are going to tell them where to look), so it's not like you're actually eliminating the bias, you're just obfuscating it. You hire consultants when obfuscation is the point - it's not Jim from down the hall saying this, its the consultants. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for obfuscation, but it's always some variation on "so and so needs to hear this, just not from me."
anal_reactor 1y ago
What if your in-house engineers are morons but you need to have one particular project done correctly. I don't understand the glorification of normal engineers - quite often they're normal people drawn from normal distribution, with all consequences of that.

zwnow 1y ago

Another win for AI! /s

jack_riminton 1y ago

As someone who did an MBA and was groomed to be a Consultant and then repented (now a software engineer) you have to understand that the customer of a consultancy project is an exec. 1. The exec has been charged with exploring a new product space, a potential M&A deal, more vertical integration etc etc 2. The exec needs a gauge on the "size of the prize", is this thing worth doing? roughly how will it be done? how long etc. 3. The exec probably already has a rough idea or gut feeling about one such option 4. The consultants produce something that usually supports the gut feeling, other times it will suggest alternatives and provide some facts and figures to support

jwx48 1y ago
Bingo. Therein lies the difference between a “client” and a “customer”.
sigwinch 1y ago
Years ago, I was introduced to a “what would Elon do?” assistant. Execs want to know what their (current or hypothetical) competition would do given their decision-support data. But they also want to know what a consult-assistant cutout would know. (This was long before his political achievements)
deaux 1y ago
This entirely depends on industry and geography. I've worked with big companies where the customers of consultants were effectively middle management, several layers removed from execs.
- jack_riminton 1y ago
  True, they are called the "Hidden Client", any good consultant will be able to essentially do intelligence gathering on who that is and what they want, because it will be one exec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vMdZhIfPjs&list=PLtuDeBJEKi7yRqt-jvxV7Yt_dVlRMJ-bw&index=3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vMdZhIfPjs&list=PLtuDeBJEKi...
coffeebeqn 1y ago

rimbo789 1y ago

Are there any organizations on earth that, for their economic size, produce so little value to society than the Big 4?

DrScientist 1y ago

While we are on the topic of listing problems with consultants/outsourcing - another potential problem is the A team/ B team switch. During initial engagement you are often talking to somebody who appears to actually know their stuff - you hire them and find that this knowledgable person has moved on to the next big sales, and you've got the B or C team.

DrScientist 1y ago
To balance that with a positive comment - one of the reasons for going with a consultant/outsourcing is if you have a big one/off type project that you can't resource internally with perms. So the choice is trying to hire a bunch of individual contractors and forge them into a team, or hire a pre-built team for a period of time [1] [1] Sometimes it's sold as a re-built team - but in reality it might be hired in exactly the same way by the consultancy....
- Gigachad 1y ago
  I just don’t see how this happens for government work though. Surely they have enough year round work to hire people in house for it.
  - codebje 1y ago
    The Australian federal government goes through waves of "reducing the size of the public service" by firing and/or capping full-time hires, but the work's still there to be done so contractors get the gig.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
      This is the thing. Its much less expensive to have these sorts of knowledge employees on government staff who just do this sort of work all the time, but governments prefer to spend more (much much more) on contractors. I suspect its partly because they are always wanting to announce down-sizing initiatives to appease the right, but I think more cynically, its because contractors will more reliably give them the 'right answer' than career civil servants and there's also the potential for kickbacks. Some of those profits paid to contractor companies might find their way back into campaign contributions.

DrScientist 1y ago

In the UK there is a bit of a problem with a revolving door between government and the big consultancy firms. The most egregious example of this is where the big accountancy firms offer political parties help in formulating tax policy and once it's enacted then go around charging companies for their expertise on how to comply/avoid the new rules.

emmelaich 1y ago

Not unrelated, but the Albanese govt spending way too much on consultants. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloitte-to-pay-money-back-to-albanese-government-after-using-ai-in-440000-report https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloi... https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/labor-vowed-to-crack-down-on-consultants-but-spending-is-going-up-20250724-p5mhku.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/labor-vowed-to-crack...

HelloUsername 1y ago
> https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloitte-to-pay-money-back-to-albanese-government-after-using-ai-in-440000-report https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloi... Why did you include the same article that you're posting on?
- emmelaich 1y ago
  Oops. I'm pretty sure I had a much older article but must've fouled up my copy'n'paste. But while I'm here .. https://retractionwatch.com/2024/03/04/kpmg-government-report-on-research-integrity-makes-up-reference-involving-retraction-watch-founders/ https://retractionwatch.com/2024/03/04/kpmg-government-repor... "KPMG government report on research integrity makes up reference involving Retraction Watch founders" An August 2023 report on research integrity by consulting firm KPMG, commissioned by an Australian government agency, contains a made-up reference, Retraction Watch has discovered.
JohnKemeny 1y ago
The Albanese government is the sitting federal government of Australia, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of the Labor Party.

alexdoesstuff 1y ago

This is primarily a story of a failure to supervise the creation of the report, rather than anything related to AI. The role of the outsourced consultancy in such a project is to make sure the findings withstand public scrutiny. They clearly failed on this. It's quite shocking that the only consequence is a partial refund rather than a review of any current and future engagements with the consultancy due to poor performance. There shouldn't be a meaningful difference if the error in the report is minor or consequential for the finding, or if it is introduced by poorly used AI or a caffeinated up consultant in a late-night session.

JCM9 1y ago

CEOs keep taking (mostly misguided) about how GenAI will replace their people. The thing they miss, and this highlights, is that customers will also expect to pay far less for GenAI produced workloads, which likely more than eliminates any cost savings. Congrats clueless CEO… you’re now selling a worse product at lower margins. Success!

sammorrowdrums 1y ago
Relatedly, I think that success in post-AI business will be about doing more with the same or more people, not the same with less. Like you say, the AI part reduces the value and increases the availability of anything automated, so competing by trying to fire the most people to do keep doing the same job is simply not the game of anyone wanting their business to survive. You have to provide scale and quality that was out of reach before and is now table stakes (whenever now is for a given industry).
trollbridge 1y ago
This particular report concerned paying benefits (or not paying them) to unemployed people trying to find work - in other words, the very people who allegedly will be losing their jobs to AI.
favflam 1y ago
Just to add to this, customers are paying for a human to take responsibility for getting a job done. An amorphous "AI" cannot take responsibility and therefore does not merit the funds being spent on things like this report.
Hoasi 1y ago
"We can drive the value of a service towards zero and create additional value at the same time," was the thinking here.
- figassis 1y ago
  I think you mean "We can drive the cost of a service towards zero and create additional value at the same time," was the thinking here. Don't think they realized they'd also be driving the value to zero.

moron4hire 1y ago

I've been a consultant for most of the last 20 (actually come to think of it, 25) years. Even did a brief stint at Deloitte. There is a lot of prejudice against consulting. Places like Deloitte, Accenture, are some of the largest companies in the world, so when they fuck up (which they seem previously designed to do, Deloitte was the quest job I've ever had), they fuck up big and very visibly. But there is a super long tail of consultancies that are basically mom-and-pop businesses offering expertise that other small and medium sized businesses can't afford to keep on staff 100% of the time. It's not just management consulting, there is a lot of consulting for execution in a wide variety of areas. We do our jobs and go away quietly and someone else gets to take the credit. That's pretty much the nature of consulting. So you never hear about it. You just get the sound bites about McKinsey or whoever charging millions to tell NYC "use garbage cans".

ctippett 1y ago
Funnily enough, in Australia a lot of those "mum and pop" consultancies (the successful ones at least) are getting slurped up by the likes of Cognizant and co.
- heisenbit 1y ago
  This may be more related to buying contacts than buying expertise.
  - moron4hire 1y ago
    Yeah, because there's no IP, the MBAs don't see any "company" to buy. As a small consultancy owner, you're basically hoping you can sell the contracts when you're ready to retire.

trollbridge 1y ago

For a bit of background, this report concerned a problematic IT system that was incorrectly sending life-ruining fines to people for not meeting their requirements to apply for so many jobs, accept jobs, etc. whilst on government assistance. The fines came in the form of a judgment debt so people would literally have a debt bailiff show up and start carting their property away. Due to a seriously flawed IT system, this even happened to people who weren't on any government benefits at all. So, a report gets commissioned that a company like Deloitte gets paid $440k for, and then they cheat and use AI to generate it, complete with more errors. Imagine what would happen if they retained Deloitte next to build the system. I foresee another repeat of the Fujitsu Royal Mail scandal.

gdulli 1y ago
You don't have to imagine: https://cybernews.com/news/rhode-island-deloitte-data-breach/ https://cybernews.com/news/rhode-island-deloitte-data-breach...
chris_wot 1y ago
Why bother with going through Deloitte? Just go straight to OpenAI.
- recursive 1y ago
  Dear OpenAI: Whose door should I break down today? There's no need to explain the reason, just give me the address.
  - orthecreedence 1y ago
    Sincerely, ICE
    - lostlogin 1y ago
      When humans want a scapegoat, the target is often chosen based on race. What will AI pick on?

SamLeBarbare 1y ago

Mix-up in title... it's not the Australian gov. Albanian mix-up, again, "arrêter de vous trump'er svp"

Macha 1y ago
Anthony _Albanese_ is the name of the current PM of Australia

thisisit 1y ago

Just today a consulting firm asked if they can use AI to generate user guides and documentation. I refused because of the hallucination issues. But got overruled by the end users - who are going to use these documents. They are convinced that AI will move things faster. When it comes time to using the document they are most likely going to feed the doc to AI and ask for summary and steps. Write document using AI and then read/summarize using AI.

paxys 1y ago

Knowing how these IT consulting firms work the AI-generated report was probably better quality that what they would have otherwise delivered.

sidcool 1y ago

I have worked in Consultancies for a long time. And many people here don't know what they do. Of course, there are bad apples that cheat. But a lot of good value in consultancies too! One evidence is that they are still around and earn billions.

u_sama 1y ago
I am legitimately curious what is the day to day work, and what is the consumer itch they itch for the companies. Could you develop on your experiences and what is the missing POV that makes so many HNers be against consultancies?
ksajh 1y ago
Being around and earning billions does not mean they're producing appropriate value

deleted 1y ago

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iamleppert 1y ago

I work in a building where Deloitte has an office. I see their employees riding the elevator and sometimes in other common areas. I just same here to say they are some of the most depressed and down-trodden group of people I have ever seen. They are noticeably different than other employees in the building. What's wrong with working at Deloitte that is does this to people?

recursivecaveat 1y ago
I think all the major public accounting firms are like that. Super hierarchical, dreary work, very corporate attitude. Everyone is there exclusively to hopefully climb to the top of the crab bucket. Imagine all the worst aspects of a FAANG company, but also all the peons are making a fraction of their tech compatriots.

boramalper 1y ago

Deloitte named a Leader in Worldwide Artificial Intelligence Services by IDC MarketScape https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/about/recognition/analyst-relations/deloitte-named-leader-in-worldwide-artificial-intelligence-services-by-idc-marketscape.html https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/about/recognition/analyst...

para_parolu 1y ago

I have such a bad experience with Deloitte when calculating my tax return. Almost like some lazy joke about capitalism. It’s a very dysfunctional company. They were calculating taxes in year when I moved from Europe to US and assigned two people, one for each country. For a month they were not able to make proper adjustments, until I realized they can’t talk to each other. One day I just started conference call from my phone to introduce them to each other and make sure they at least can talk. Nevertheless, in the end they made mistakes that cost me $5000. Luckily I was able to fix it with IRS two tears after

janalsncm 1y ago

I imagine that we will look back fondly on these days, when AI still is easy to spot because it hallucinates references. A non-existent reference is a slam dunk against an argument, but also technically easier to avoid. They will likely be much less common in the future. It’s much harder to counter the reasoning word salad that LLMs sometimes produce, where A doesn’t really connect to B but the text insists it does.

chanux 1y ago

I have seen this reported widely, discussed in a few forums. This will also do nothing to this company.

datadrivenangel 1y ago
Long term reputation is everything for these companies. Eventually their regulatory capture isn't strong enough if their purchases would lose reputation by buying Deloitte.

panick21_ 1y ago

Government need to have their own expertise. Specially in the anglo world, it seems governments are obsessed with not doing anything at all and are staffed mostly by a few admin staff. No innovation without 5 million $ to some lazy as outside consulting company.

apwell23 1y ago

why was the Albanese changed from the title?

Huppie 1y ago
Because it's confusing most likely. As others have pointed out: > Anthony _Albanese_ is the name of the current PM of Australia Which is probably why this Australian publication calls it the 'Albanese Government'. Not to be confused with the government of Albania.

sema4hacker 1y ago

Sounds like there will be a market for an AI tool that proofreads AI-generated documents. Or will that even be possible?

linhns 1y ago

With the quality of work Deloitte has been churning out recently, AI or humans do not matter anymore.

PieTime 1y ago

Management consult grift is reaching its inevitable end. They’ll cut out the management and insert AI consultants.