Identifying students

A key goal of the TCSI project has been to improve how we identify students. Duplicate identifiers can lead to inaccurate entitlement checks that make managing course fees difficult for providers. It can also be confusing for students trying to understand their payment options.

TCSI is implementing a number of measures to improve matching and verification to make sure students are accurately identified at a provider, across providers, and over time. The system will automatically trigger verification of:

• TFNs
• CHESSNs
• USIs (where applicable)
• Addresses

The processes for assigning, checking and linking CHESSNs are currently under review. We will release more information about these processes when the design is finalised.

Address verification will check Australian addresses against those recognised by Australia Post. This will make the information in TCSI as accurate and useful as possible while also helping providers identify addresses that might have been provided incorrectly by students.