Home Office investigated student visa fraud applications



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The UK government is currently under investigation for its decision to cancel 36,000 student visas for fraud charges in English tests.

The Home Office also expelled more than 1,000 people after launching its own investigation into exam fraud in 2014.

The National Audit Office's (NAO) Expenditure Audit stated that the Home Office's response would be reviewed once its decisions were subject to "public scrutiny".

The Home Office says that it "supports" the investigation.

In a statement, the NAO said: "The Interior Ministry has canceled student visas proving that he had cheated, but his decisions have been subject to further public and parliamentary scrutiny at following the Windrush scandal.

"The NAO reviews the information held by the Home Office on the number of people alleged to have cheated and on the measures taken by the Home Office to date."

The scandal of cheating was revealed during a BBC Panorama undercover survey of frauds in two centers that administer mandatory language tests.

The English Test for International Communication (TOEIC), then approved by the government, includes a written and oral section as well as a separate multiple choice questions paper.

Theresa May, then secretary of the interior, said that the evidence was "very shocking".

As a result, the Home Office ordered the US Educational Testing Service (ETS) to test more than 58,000 tests between 2011 and 2014.

Voice recognition software suggested that proxy-tested people were used in more than 30,000 cases.

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How did they try to cheat?

Technology extracts biometric features from an individual's speech to create a voice print, the voice equivalent of a fingerprint.

He then searched for possible matches indicating that the same person had pbaded several tests before the auditors checked for suspicious matches.

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Until now, the Home Office said that 25 people had been convicted of "facilitating" exam fraud.

But Labor MP Stephen Timms said many students had been falsely accused and that they had not had the opportunity to clarify their names.

On Thursday, Tim Ham, MP for East Ham, told Victoria Derbyshire that the treatment of students had been "a shame".

"They trusted Great Britain to provide them with a decent education, and instead they were falsely accused of cheating and had no chance of appealing."

Foreign students accused of cheating by officials told the BBC that they had been left in limbo for years.

Fatema Chowdhury arrived in the United Kingdom from Bangladesh in 2010 and obtained her law degree in 2014 from the University of London.

Speaking Thursday as part of the Victoria Derbyshire program, she stated at one point that she was detained for a week after being accused of cheating. She denies the accusation.

Ms. Chowdury has not been ordered to leave the UK, but as long as she stays in the country, she is prevented from working and can not use the NHS for free.

"When I was delivered last year, they charged me £ 14,000 just to have a baby," she said.

She stated that her "dreams and hopes" were now gone and that she was "desperate" to talk to someone from the Home Office to prove her innocence. But after four years of testing, she said "there is no hope."

Nidhin Chand, an Indian living in Scotland, spoke to BBC Scotland earlier this month about her fight to clear up allegations of fraud.

"Crying every day"

She was accused of using a substitute to take an English test for her visa application.

She said, "I cry every day … It's painful to find that someone is dealing with fraud and arresting you in front of the public and humiliating you."

The Home Office said it hosted "real international students" and that there was no limit to the number of students studying in the UK.

In response to the new surveillance survey, a spokesperson said: "We support the National Audit Office in its work on this investigation since the beginning of the year.We will review the findings of the report as soon as possible. it will be published ".

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