Just weeks from the start of the new academic year, immigration agents fear massive backlogs in student visa processing after allegations of rampant degree fraud led Australian authorities to increase scrutiny on visa applicants from four South Asian countries.
Those four nations – India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Bhutan – were reassigned from Evidence Level 2 (EL2) to Evidence Level 3 (EL3) by the Department of Home Affairs this month, with a note on the department’s website blaming “emerging integrity issues”.
The change means student visa applicants from the four countries must now provide much more documentation, including three months’ worth of bank statements, detailed information about their available funds, and authenticated academic transcripts.
Evidence levels are not published but “this change in Evidence Levels will assist with the effective management of emerging integrity issues,” Home Affairs said, “while continuing to facilitate genuine students seeking a quality education in Australia.”
Evidence levels are normally only reviewed at regular intervals, but industry reports suggest this latest change came at the behest of Department of Education and Australian Federal Police investigators concerned about reports of a massive fraudulent degree ring in India.
That fraud ring was uncovered in December after police in the state of Kerala, in the country’s south west, found a known criminal had built a nationwide printing network to produce fraudulent degrees with forged signatures, holograms, and university seals.
Authorities arrested three individuals and seized almost 100,000 fake degrees linked to 22 universities outside Kerala, with customers paying between $1,250 and $2,500 (75,000 to 150,000 rupees) each.
Allegations of fraud activity have circulated for years, amid speculation students purchasing the degrees were also exploited by criminal organisations to support stalking, hacking, data theft, vandalism, blackmail, and other activities.
Evidence of fraud drives integrity concerns
Outlined under the Simplified Student Visa Framework (SSVF), the evidence designations refer to the methodology Home Affairs uses to calculate each country’s risk of fraud, and the risk of fraud for each education provider.
Scores and weights reflect each country’s rate of visa cancellations and the rate of refusals due to fraud, people working too many hours, failure to maintain enrolment, and attendance and course progress.
They also factor the rate of student visa holders becoming “unlawful non-citizens”, and the country or institution’s rate of Subsequent Protection Visa applications.
Cancellations are not counted if the student requested them, nor are people who overstay their visas but resolve their immigration status within 28 days.
The threshold for EL3 designation means the risk of fraud is more than 2.7 times as high than for the lowest-risk providers and countries – confirming that the referenced “integrity issues” relate to changing circumstances that significantly increased the risk of fraud.
Changes could hit Australian universities hard
Home Affairs’s policy change came days after news of the counterfeiting bust was seized upon by Queensland Senator Malcolm Roberts, who floated his concerns amid estimates that over a million fake degrees had “likely” been used for overseas job applications.
The qualifications of over 4,200 students were cancelled in recent years and 23,000 foreign students “were caught purchasing their qualifications,” Roberts said – prompting government spokesperson Minister Murray Watt to laud the actions as a policy win.
“We’re very proud of the fact that we reformed the compliance measures around international education to weed out the shonks who have been running international education operations,” Watt said.
Those “shonks and crooks [were] exploiting international students who were here,” he continued, “taking money off them, and providing them with dodgy qualifications that weren’t fit for the work that they then went on to do.”
Australian government and university officials have increased their focus on mutual recognition of qualifications from India, and an Australian delegation was in India for a meeting in December when news of the fraud bust broke.
Yet with Home Affairs scrutinising applicants from four countries – which collectively supply 248,215 overseas students, or 30 per cent of Australia’s overseas student population – operational delays could hit universities just weeks out from the start of the academic year.
Suppliers of specialised systems like Australia’s Assure Docs have seized the opportunity to promote digital systems that can streamline compliance, aiming to prevent the tighter restrictions from compromising government plans to add 17,500 new overseas students this year.
