TCSI July Newsletter 2025

Post date

Thursday, July 31, 2025 - 14:00

The TCSI Newsletter helps to keep our Higher Education and VET Student Loans (VSL) providers up to date with the TCSI news.

Click on the headings below to find out more:

For VSL and Higher Education Providers

TCSI contact information

Providers are expected to ensure their contact details are kept up to date.

The department communicates with providers regularly on TCSI student data reporting. It is important for all providers to maintain accurate and up-to-date TCSI contact information.

TCSI Primary, Secondary and Group Mailbox Contacts

TCSI primary, secondary contacts and group mailboxes will receive ministerial notice updates, a copy of CEO and Vice Chancellor communications from TCSI Support, and are the point of contact if there are anomalies detected in provider data.

To ensure TCSI has the correct contact for your organisation, all providers are advised to complete the ‘TCSI Provider Contact’ form, based upon the below TCSI criteria, if there is a change to your previous nomination.

TCSI Support requires an individual staff member to be nominated as the primary contact, with contact details including name, phone number and email address to be supplied. If providers would like to nominate a group mailbox, please list it under the ‘group mailbox’ section of the contact form. The secondary contact can be either an individual staff member or a group mailbox.

TCSI Newsletter and Web Alert Subscription

Providers are encouraged to remind their colleagues to subscribe to the TCSI Newsletter to ensure they are receiving TCSI updates. This form also allows providers to update their subscription options for TCSI web alerts (outage notices). Individuals from your organisation should keep their subscription preferences up to date if their role or provider type changes. There is no limit to the number of subscribers that providers can have to the TCSI Newsletter.

HITS Contacts

The HELP Information Technology System (HITS) is utilised to manage information about approved providers, including contact information for staff members such as vice-chancellors (VCs) and chief executive officers (CEOs). It is a requirement for approved providers to ensure their contact information is accurate and up to date in HITS.

For any enquiries related to HITS:

Higher education providers, please contact FEE-HELP@education.gov.au.
VET Student Loan providers, please contact VETStudentLoans@dewr.gov.au

Privacy reminder

Protect personal information. A reminder to all providers to follow data privacy and security guidelines.

TCSI Support would like to remind providers that they need to continue to consider their own obligations and consider the 13 Australian Privacy Principles outlined under the Privacy Act 1988 when sending data via email to TCSI support.

TCSI Support issues and information requests

Please ensure that the information does not breach the individual’s privacy and does not contain information such as:

TFN
CHESSN
Name details
Date of Birth
Addresses
ATSI Code

If student information needs to be communicated to the department, providers can send the following identifiers:

If TCSI support requires sensitive data in relation to an enquiry, they will send follow up correspondence requesting the data to be uploaded using the department’s secure Web Transfer Client (FTP server).

For additional information relating to Privacy for both students and providers, please see Privacy notice messaging for students.

TCSI test data

Reminder: Actual live or production data should not be used in the test environment.

Providers should consider their obligations and consider the 13 Australian Privacy Principles outlined under the Privacy Act 1988.

Whilst actual live or production data should not be used for testing purposes, providers can consider using de-identified data, with the acknowledgement and confirmation of certain conditions. These are:

The provider is sufficiently satisfied that the data has been de-identified in such a way that it cannot be un-scrambled or re-identified.
In the event that this data is published or exposed externally, the provider maintains no concern to its privacy or security sensitivity. Essentially, the government will treat this data as unclassified material.
In the event that data is able to be un-scrambled or re-identified, the provider holds all responsibility for this and any associated implications.

The department strongly advises providers to seek internal legal advice prior to exploring the usage of de-identified production data for testing in the TCSI test environment.

For more information on using the TEST environment, including how to create mock TFNs, please see TCSI - Testing for providers.

Upcoming webinars

All providers are invited to attend upcoming webinars and drop-in sessions.

These sessions are an excellent opportunity to get up-to-date information and to ask any questions you might have about TCSI.

A list of upcoming TCSI webinars can be found below:

Webinar	Time	Date
TCSI Support drop-in session	2pm [AEST]	13 August 2025
TCSI August Provider Webinar	2pm [AEST]	27 August 2025
TCSI Support drop-in session	2pm [AEST]	10 September 2025
TCSI September Provider Webinar	2pm [AEST]	24 September 2025
TCSI Support drop-in session	2pm [AEDT]	8 October 2025
TCSI October Provider Webinar	2pm [AEDT]	29 October 2025

To attend the scheduled 2025 monthly TCSI webinars live, please register via the TCSI News Centre webpage.

Recordings of previous webinars can be found at the following locations:

For Monthly provider webinars, please see the ‘Published Newsletters, Webinars and other media’ section of the News Centre webpage.

For VSL Providers only

Increasing previously paid VET Student Loan amounts

A VET Student Loan (VSL) amount cannot be increased if a payment has been made or is being processed.

As of 4 July 2025, a VET Student Loan amount cannot be increased if a payment has been made or is being processed by the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR). A previously paid loan amount can still be decreased.

Real-time validation (RTV) 11089, was released on 4 July which will prevent the E558: HELP loan amount from being increased if a payment has been made for the loan, or is being processed by the department. Please see the 4 July 2025 production release notes for more information.

To report an increased loan amount, providers can add the increased amount to a subsequent unit enrolment that has not yet been processed (that is, the cost of the subsequent unit enrolment is charged at a higher rate). DEWR would typically expect this to occur where subsequent unit enrolments for the relevant course are available. DEWR will accept that any amount up to 10% of the indexed loan cap for a course as being reasonable.

Where this is not feasible, a new unit enrolment should be reported. It should be reported with the same information except:

pre-fix ‘INCR’ to the original E354: Unit of study code followed by as much of the original value up to the 12-character field limit to make it unique and
only the relevant amount added to amount charged, loan fee and HELP loan amount. Amount paid upfront should be reported as ‘0’.
Please see the increasing student loan amounts guide for further information.

A list of updates to the reporting requirements related to this change are available via the 2025 TCSI change control document, which can be found on the VET Student Loans 2025 and Higher Education Student 2025 reporting requirements pages. Relevant changes have an issue date of 8/07/2025.

For an example of how to report this change, please see TCSI June 2025 provider webinar recording.

Please reach out to VETStudentLoans@dewr.gov.au if you have any questions or concerns.

For Higher Education Providers only

Critical Loan Errors Dashboard Update

Unique Student Identifier (USI) validations will soon be visible on the dashboard.

The TCSI Analytics Critical Loan Errors dashboard will soon include the USI Complexity category, helping providers identify and prioritise USI verification errors that may affect higher education student loan transfers to ATO.

As advised in the TCSI March 2025 Newsletter, for the release of the loan, providers must ensure all requirements for the successful transfer of a loan are met (i.e. the Tax File Number is verified in TCSI, a USI is reported in TCSI, and scheduled validations have been resolved).

Providers are encouraged to monitor the TCSI releases and upcoming development page for this release. This update is expected to be available in early August.