The Spanish Public Employment Service (SEPE) utilizes an automated platform in order to determine unemployment benefits and distribute employment opportunities and job training to the unemployed (AlgorithmWatch 2019). Since implementation, the amount of people receiving unemployment benefits has gone down by more than 50% (ibid). While it’s unsure if the automated system is entirely to blame for the denial of benefits, scholars argue that deficient data reconciliation, or system malfunction stemming from incorrect data and input error, is an inevitable and commonplace problem within algorithmic systems and is the likely culprit within the SEPE (ibid).
