By Justin Brake, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Independent
November 26, 2025
Deloitte Canada says it “firmly stands behind the recommendations put forward” in a healthcare report it produced for the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador that included errors generated by artificial intelligence.
One of the world’s largest accounting firms, Deloitte broke its silence Tuesday, four days after The Independent first reportedthe 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’s staffing crisis.
The firm also said in its statement, sent to The Independent without a name attached and attributed to a “Deloitte Canada spokesperson,” that it is “revising the report to make a small number of citation corrections, which do not impact the report findings.”
The anonymous spokesperson also said AI “was not used to write the report,” and that it was “selectively used to support a small number of research citations.”
Those citations reference research articles which don’t 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.
One of the citations was used to substantiate a claim that a group of researchers “found” registered respiratory therapists working in acute care during the COVID-19 pandemic “reported increased workload and stress levels due to the pandemic.” Deloitte’s report—still available on the government’s website—claims the article is titled “The impact of COVID-19 on respiratory therapist workload and stress levels in Canada” and was published in the Canadian Journal of Respiratory Therapy.
On Tuesday a representative from the Canadian Society of Respiratory Therapists, which owns the Canadian Journal of Respiratory Therapy, contacted The Independent after reading the Nov. 22 story to confirm the article named in Deloitte’s report “has not been published in the Canadian Journal of Respiratory Therapy.”
Jason Nickerson, the Canadian Society of Respiratory Therapists’ senior director of public policy, also said he and the organization “have no further information on the veracity or origins of this citation and were not involved or consulted in the drafting of this report.”
Following the revelations, the province’s New Democratic Party called on the government to implement regulations around AI use in government reports. On Monday Premier Tony Wakeham’s office told The Independent it had asked the Department of Government Services to “undertake a review of what guidelines should be put in place to stop this from happening in the future.”
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’s AI language system Azure OpenAI in the report’s creation.
“We are fully responsible for the quality of our work, including the accuracy of report citations, and are committed to continually evolving our governance and practices around the use of AI and emerging technologies to help ensure accuracy, transparency and accountability,” the anonymous Deloitte Canada spokesperson said.
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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.
