THE Gillard government is struggling to manage the international student visa program, failing to keep track of hundreds of thousands of potential visa breaches.
The Australian National Audit Office has found the Department of Immigration's key administrative structures and processes "were not sufficiently robust" to ensure the "integrity" of the program, while student numbers have soared.
Problems identified included the assessment of visa applicants, with the audit finding the department was "struggling to cope" with the scale and complexity of the program while its assessment methodology was not up to date and did not include current risks.
Auditor-General Ian McPhee also discovered there was a backlog of 350,000 non-compliance notices issued by schools and universities -- when students fail to attend classes, start a course or pass subjects -- that had not been checked by March last year.
"The rapid growth of the (students visa australia) program, with over 400,000 overseas students living in Australia in 2009-10, places significant pressure on DIAC's compliance functions," Mr McPhee concluded.
"DIAC's integrity and compliance units were hampered in managing this pressure by the department's failure to update its national compliance activities and by the backlog of non-compliance notices."
He found the department knew there was a backlog problem in 2006, but it grew to 350,000 last year before action was taken. By March this year, 145,000 of the notices had been "finalised" by department staff.
"While the large number of the NCNs (non-compliance notices) in the backlog are trivial and carry no compliance implications, there are potentially serious cases of student non-compliance 'hidden' within the backlog, particularly in the category of 'non-commencement of course'," he wrote.
"The backlog has prevented these cases from being identified and dealt with."
Mr McPhee also found it was "not feasible" for the department actively to monitor if all 400,000 students had breached their visas -- including whether they had worked more than 20 hours a week.
The audit comes before the release of the government's own review into visas for the $18.6 billion international education industry, which is due mid-year.
Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said the department was gridlocked by the Gillard government's border protection policy failures. "What the audit has essentially found is a department unable to tell the government how many students are in breach of their visas; how many are working more than 20 hours a week or how many are not actually enrolled in courses," Mr Morrison said.
A spokesman for Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said the "unprecedented growth" of the student visa program had "presented significant challenges".
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