Emigrant graduates cost Australia 450 million dollars in HECS

As reported by The Conversation, university graduates from Australia who move abroad to work for extended periods have deprived the nation of nearly $450 million of unpaid HECS debts ever since the payment programme was introduced in 1989.

A study by Australian National University research scientists Tim Higgins and Bruce Chapman (who designed the HECS programme) has discovered that, at the current rate, the amount of total forgone revenue will very soon top $1 billion.

The authors concluded that, since there was so little information about the amount of university graduates who had moved abroad, or the length of time they had stayed overseas to work, the results therefore were merely conservative estimates and are considered as “understatements” of the true HECS loss.

There was a variety of ways the Government could recover the cash, said the authors in their study. Australia could agree with other nations to use their internal tax services to collect the student debts by using the same income-contingent guidelines in force in Australia.

However, added the report, this may seem fanciful since only New Zealand, England, South Africa and Hungary currently have systems of income tax-dependant student loan collections, although many other nations seem likely to go in this direction over time.