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The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission has arrested 59 staff of public and private universities between 2017 and 2022 for bribery, abuse of power, false claims and other financial offences. One of the cases involved a director of a public university recently, allegedly receiving a car as an inducement to help a company obtain a tender worth about RM1.6 million, while a university professor was also arrested over alleged false claims involving a research fund of RM66,000.

The Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DVAC) has booked eight persons, including four former employees of the varsity and four private persons for criminal conspiracy, criminal breach of trust, cheating, forgery, and falsification of accounts. While perusing the details of registration and tuition fees of 16,580 students, the DVAC officials found that the serial number of one demand draft was used multiple times against several students.

The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority has filed a charge sheet at the Special Court against 11 people for embezzling a huge amount of money from the Council for Technical Education and Vocational Training (CTEVT) to conduct training programmes for teachers. The school administration and CTEVT officials colluded to embezzle state funds by submitting fake bills, including for never conducted trainings.

The Indonesian Anti-Corruption Commission (KPK) has arrested the Rector of the University of Lampung for allegedly receiving IDR5 billion (US$336,000) in bribes from the families of students who failed the university entrance exams known as the autonomous admissions scheme. According to KPK, the ‘autonomous channel’ exam conducted by universities is vulnerable to bribery due to a lack of transparency and specific guidelines from the Ministry of Education, leaving state universities unsupervised.

The Anti-Corruption Commission has charged five members and an executive director of the North South University (NSU) board of governors with abuse of power, increasing their allowances to ten times the approved rate, and buying luxury cars at the expense of students. For more than a decade, NSU has offered several Bachelor of Business Administration programmes without University Grants Commission approval. According to an investigator, NSU was allowed to enrol 50 students in approved BBA programmes, but it enrolled about 2,700 students in one semester.

TEQSA’s Higher Education Integrity Unit has updated a database of 2,333 suspected commercial academic cheating service websites, including 579 sites specifically targeting students at Australian Higher Education institutions. This intelligence sharing will enable providers to block access to these websites from their institutional networks and is part of TEQSA’s ongoing partnership with the Higher Education sector to strengthen cultures of academic integrity.

A report from Calcutta High Court shows how the West Bengal Central School Service Commission (WBSSC) allegedly misused the Right to Information (RTI) Act to facilitate illegal recruitment. The chairman of the WBSSC had instructed the chairpersons of the five regional commissions to scan and store their signatures on the WBSSC’s application server. These were used as illegal digital signatures for over 500 fake recommendation letters, allegedly hand-delivered to undeserving candidates.

Following a growing number of misconduct allegations involving ministers and public servants, Queensland Department of Education Director-General announced zero tolerance to fraud and corruption and encouraged a culture of commitment to working with integrity. Employees and state school teachers and staff can now report alleged corruption through a new anonymous online portal.