Incident 137: Israeli Tax Authority Employed Opaque Algorithm to Impose Fines, Reportedly Refusing to Provide an Explanation for Amount Calculation to a Farmer
Description: An Israeli farmer was imposed a computer generated fine by the tax authority, who allegedly were not able to explain its calculation, and refused to disclose the program and its source code.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Israeli Tax Authority developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Moshe Har Shemesh and Israeli people having tax fines.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
137
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2021-01-11
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
GMF Taxonomy Classifications
Taxonomy DetailsKnown AI Goal
Financial Processing
Potential AI Technology
Regression
Known AI Technical Failure
Lack of Transparency
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline

A tax dispute between a ranch in Israel’s southern Negev desert and the country’s tax authority has given rise to an issue which could have far reaching repercussions on the public’s ability to oversee and even understand government acts.
T…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.