TAFE managers didn’t want reputation ‘muddied’

The Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission inquiry heard Kangan’s business development manager, Coralee Hayden-Long, and partnership delivery manager, Travis Hodgson, were explicitly told at a meeting in February, 2015, an internal investigation at the company, Zinfra, had found its staff members were fraudulently enrolled in an engineering course.

Zinfra’s human resources manager, Melanie Stacey, told the inquiry the “premise of the meeting was around concerns raised by Kangan about their reputation, and they didn’t want that to be muddied”.

The Zinfra investigation was instigated after 15 employees at the company were allegedly enrolled in a Certificate IV in Engineering course at Kangan without their knowledge.

Ms Stacey said one of the Kangan managers told her in the meeting they had “hundreds of examples of students saying that they will swear that they weren’t enrolled in a program”, including one who went to the police with concerns their identity was stolen, but in 99.9 per cent of cases nothing was untoward.

“[We] were sitting there really not believing what we were hearing and they had said that it was not uncommon to pre-fill the induction forms, because sometimes, you know, people at work, they’re really busy and that often employers would fill it in on behalf of the students or the TAFE might do that, so – which we didn’t believe that that was the case at all,” she said.

“There was a heap of excuses as to the myriad of possibilities about how the course may have been promoted.

“Our understanding is that they were trying to pull the wool over our eyes and stop us from asking more questions.”

Two months earlier, the alleged mastermind of a scheme to siphon off government funds who had claimed to be delivering the Certificate IV training, Rebecca Taylor, advised Ms Hayden-Long her own engineering qualification had been revoked, the inquiry heard.

Under questioning from Ian Hill QC, council assisting the inquiry, Ms Hayden-Long accepted this should have been a “red light” because “you would have been fully aware that to get funding, not only do the students have to be eligible, but the person delivering the training has to be qualified”.

Ms Hayden-Long said she did not make any inquiries of the other TAFE which revoked the qualification after Ms Taylor said she would write to them to ask for further information and “alluded to a witch hunt” by the institution.

“The decision, no doubt, to rescind a qualification also needs to be respected by other TAFEs,” Mr Hill said, to which Ms Hayden-Long replied: “Without a doubt. Yes.”

“And I think, as you readily concede in hindsight, perhaps that inquiry should have been made … rather than to accept some explanation from the person who had had the qualification rescinded,” Mr Hill said.

“Yes,” Ms Hayden-Long responded.

Ms Hayden-Long said she first learned Zinfra employees were enrolled in the course, rather than Jetstar employees “and no one else” as she had been told by Ms Taylor, in mid-January when some of them phoned the TAFE to complain.

Ms Hayden-Long said she confronted Ms Taylor the week after the meeting at Zinfra about why the company’s employees had been enrolled as Jetstar employees and Ms Taylor admitted she had “slipped them in”.

“[I] said ‘I believe you’ve deliberately put – slipped the [Zinfra] enrolment forms in under the umbrella of the Jetstar’, and she admitted [it],” she said.

“At that stage, she still was adamant the training had occurred, that these individuals existed, and that the project – even though she had slipped them in under the umbrella of the Jetstar project, that training still had occurred.”

Mr Hill said “the easy way to find out whether these 15 students had been given training was to approach them”, but Ms Hayden-Long said she was discouraged from doing so by Zinfra.

“At that time they were quite adamant that they didn’t want us anywhere near those 15 people and that they were going to write to our protected disclosure office and ask for all the personal information, which we, of course, respected that and waited for that letter,” she said.

The Kangan Institute merged with the Bendigo TAFE in July, 2015, and Ms Hayden-Long said it was due to the resulting “frantic and impossible workloads” that no one from the institute visited the airport from nearby Broadmeadows to confirm Jetstar employees were undertaking the training.

“The first six months of 2015 were frantic and impossible workloads, so I can only make the assumption that those things dropped down on the priority list at the time,” she said.

“Or alternatively, express dropped off the priority list, yes?,” Mr Hill asked.

“Yes,” Ms Hayden-Long replied.

Mr Hill said Kangan was “hoodwinked” into the agreement by Ms Taylor, which had the TAFE “exercised due diligence and probity, you would have found out during the early months of the arrangement”, which Ms Hayden-Long accepted.

“That is, if someone had simply gone from Broadmeadows to Tullamarine … they may well have found out there was no such training being undertaken,” he said.