You are required to report data for all students studying in approved courses who have been approved for a VET Student Loan.
On this page:
Note: where a student is approved for a VET Student Loan at a time after commencing their study, all relevant data from the commencement of study must be reported as soon as reasonably possible. This means that previous units of study that did not involve a VET Student Loan will need to be reported to provide a complete picture of student’s study in a course.
Data that you submit is used in:
- monitoring your compliance with the Act and Rules
- the publication of aggregate level information relating to the operation of the VSL program [part 56]
- data analysis and/or insight to further enhance understanding of the VSL students and provider populations
- submitting student debt information to the ATO that relates to the VSL program.
Civil penalties apply for failing to provide required data or providing false or misleading data.
You must comply with the data reporting requirements issued by the department. These requirements are located at VET Reporting Requirements | TCSI Support.
Contact officer information in HITS for CEO/CFO
You must keep your CEO/CFO contact officer information in HITS up to date. Instructions on how to update this information can be found in the HITS User Guide.
Uploading documents
You must upload any sensitive documents to HITS under Ad-Hoc documents, using the category Administration. This includes variation requests, audited financial statements and any documents containing private student information. You must not include student TFNs in any documents uploaded to HITS.
55.1 - Data you must report
You must report:
- student data – information on student enrolments, and the personal details of students approved for a loan
- course data – information on your approved courses
- unit of study outcomes and course outcomes submissions – details of students’ completion, withdrawal or deferments of courses and parts of courses.
Unit of study outcomes should be reported for all units – this applies even for the last unit and even if a course completion has already been reported.
55.2 - Data certification
You must undertake a thorough quality assurance process before submitting your data. All student enrolment, unit and course outcome data must be quality checked and confirmed as accurate by an Executive Officer as defined in the Act before you submit it.
Your data must be accurate, complete, timely and submitted in the form prescribed in the VSL Data Reporting Notice on VET Reporting Requirements | TCSI Support. Inaccurate or late data reporting may invalidate your payment from the department. If you submit invalid student enrolment data, we will provide you with a report detailing all unit of study records which are in error. This report will include the error codes. Please download the Provider Payment Report in HITS for this information.
The Data Reporting Requirements for 2025 fact sheet details the error codes and how to fix them.
55.3 - Data validation
Some validations occur in TCSI. Other checks against the VSL Rules are completed at the time of monthly payment assessment.
Records that have failed the payment validation process (which allows 2–3 months for rectification) will subsequently be invalidated in TCSI. You can view invalidated records for the current payment cycle on the fourth tab of the Provider Payment Report in HITS.
55.4 - Increasing previously paid loan amounts
You must not edit data to increase the VET Student Loan amount of a student that has previously been paid to you. This is because increases to paid loan amounts update the paid/effective date at the ATO and can affect how indexation is applied. Previously paid amounts may be edited to decrease the VET student loan amount.
If a loan increase is required, the provider should let the student know (by amending the Fee Notice, Statement of Covered Fees and Commonwealth Assistance Notice) and ‘roll’ the increase amount into the next unit of study.
Where the increase is required on the last unit of study, you should create a new unit with the same census date as the last unit and repeat as much of the unit ID as possible while:
- adding ‘INCR’ to the original Unit of Study Code (E354) and
- include the amount added to Amount Charged (E384), HELP Loan Amount (E558) and applicable Loan Fee (E529).
This additional loan will the paid as an increase and the old loan payment/effective date stays as it was.
A unit enrolment record should not be deleted and resubmitted to correct a loan amount. This action effect the indexation of the loan.
55.5 - Equivalent full-time study load
You will need to determine the Equivalent Full-time Study Load (EFTSL) for each student’s parts of courses or units of study. EFTSL is a measure of the study load based on a student undertaking a course on a full-time basis over an academic year. An academic year is determined by the provider based on its operations. EFTSL is used in data reporting via TCSI.
The EFTSL value is how long it will take a student to complete the part of a course or unit. The EFTSL value is the same regardless of the student’s mode of study.
See Appendix Q for an explanation of how to report EFTSL.
55.6 - Reporting deadlines
A key aspect of the VSL reporting requirements is the timeframes for data reporting.
| Data type | Reporting timeframe |
|---|---|
| Student enrolment data | Event based reporting. Within 7 days of the student enrolling in a unit of study. Loan information is required within 14 days of the census date. |
Course completions (Course outcome, and course outcome date if students have completed) | Event based reporting. Within 7 days of a student taking a leave of absence, completing the course or ceasing enrolment in the course. Course outcome date required within 7 days of student completing the course. |
Unit of study completions (Unit outcome status and unit outcome date) | Event based reporting. Within 7 days of the student enrolling in a unit of study. Within 7 days of when the updated completion status becomes available. |
| Revisions | All corrections and updates to data that have already been reported must be made:
Note: A previously paid loan amount may not be subsequently edited to increase the loan amount. An increase may be claimed by adding the increased amount to a subsequent unit of study. Where this is not possible, a new unit enrolment should be reported with the same information except:
|
Further details of reporting requirements, and all documents referred to in the Notice, are available at VET Reporting Requirements | TCSI Support.
55.7 - Common data provision issues
Please note the following common issues with data provision:
- Course codes in eCAFs and TCSI systems must match the course codes as recorded on training.gov.au and those in the VET Student Loans (Courses and Loan Caps) Determination 2016.
- Course codes in TCSI must match the student’s VSL eCAF.
- Course codes must match those listed in your Conditions of Approval.
- Loan amounts (and gap fees) must be spread evenly across the course. Payment will be rejected if the debt amount reported in a month does not reflect a reasonably proportionate spread of fees across the course duration.
- eCAF entries must match TCSI entries. For example, the student TFN, USI, CHESSN and ID, and course codes entered must match in both the eCAF system and the TCSI data submissions.
55.8 - Reporting for students without a Tax File Number
Students may be enrolled in a course of study while they are waiting to receive a Tax File Number (TFN). However, payments under VSL cannot be made until a valid TFN has been notified to the department. You cannot report a VSL student’s enrolment data without a valid TFN.
55.9 - Failure to comply with reporting requirements
You are required to provide real-time event-based data because a delegate of the Secretary of the department has exercised powers under subsection 53(1) of the Act to request this information.
A civil penalty of 60 penalty units may apply where a provider fails to comply with such a request for information. This is a strict liability offence. Senior Executives of providers may also be personally liable.
A civil penalty of 240 penalty units may apply if you:
- provide information or a document that is false or misleading
- omit any matter or thing so the information or document is misleading.
Note that giving false or misleading information is a serious offence: see section 137.1 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 and section 106 of the Act.
You can submit questions to the department using the online enquiry form on Provider Enquiries.
Legislation: Act s 53(4), s 65, s 106