The federal government was warned as early as 2012 that unscrupulous providers were rorting the vocational education loans scheme and that there were no safeguards to protect against the abuse of vulnerable students, blowing the scheme out from $325 million to $3 billion in less than three years.
It was not until 2015 that the government took emergency action, freezing payments to the sector. Now, new evidence is emerging of education operators engineering alternative ways to boost lucrative student dollars, as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission pursues several colleges for the return of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding.