Foreign students questioned over fake paperwork

June 10, 2009 - 1:16AM

SCORES of foreign students suspected of using bogus documents to support permanent residency applications have been discovered by Federal Government migration fraud investigators.

More than 60 students whose documents were initially accepted as genuine will be forced to leave Australia if they are unable to prove their documents are authentic.

It is the latest indication that rorting in the lucrative $15.5billion international education industry - the nation's third-biggest export earner - is a serious problem.

The students are suspected of using fake references from employers, which claim to show they have the required 900 hours of work experience in a job related to their area of study.

Sources in the international education industry told the Herald some students paid up to $20,000 to rogue college operators or shonky middlemen such as unscrupulous migration agents or education agents to obtain black-market paperwork.

In the past financial year, Trades Recognition Australia received 34,180 applications for skills assessment, about 10,000 of which were from foreign students. The organisation initially accepted the documents as genuine. But after the Federal Government received information suggesting their paperwork could be bogus, it sent letters to the students threatening to revoke their successful skills assessments if they did not prove their documents were authentic within 28 days.

Sushi Das

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/national/foreign-students-questioned-over-fake-paperwork-20090610-c2ey.html