Boston Consulting Group has conceded it knew a private college was having financial problems before it completed a controversial $90,000 report for TAFE NSW.
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Earlier this year, NSW Skills Minister John Barilaro promoted the Boston consulting report, which highlights the business results of a collapsed private college network whose headquarters were raided in April during a fraud investigation by the Australian Federal Police.
The report names private education operator Australian Careers Network as a competitor to the public TAFE network. But it fails to identify the debt problems associated with ACN or the police raids.
Anthony Roediger, a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, told Fairfax Media that "in hindsight" the company was aware in March that ACN was in financial trouble. This was not mentioned in the report.
He said the police raids took place after the report was written.
Mr Roediger said Boston Consulting Group was commissioned to produce a report for TAFE in January 2015 which it was paid for separately when it was completed last year.
"Then in March of 2016, we were asked ... to prepare a summary of that analysis that could be released publicly," he said.
The contract for the report, completed in 2016 at an additional cost of $90,750, was signed on April 12 and 13 of this year which was the same time the ACN raids were conducted. However, Mr Roediger said the report was completed on March 6 before the contract was signed.
Asked why Boston Consulting charged TAFE an extra $90,000 for a summary of an analysis it had already conducted the previous year, Mr Roediger said it was not simply a rehash of the information, but a summary and "translation" of the same data "for public consumption".
"What we did was describe the market as it had been and we didn't go through and update it for 2016 data," he said.
"There was a lot of work involved doing what we had to do.
"I'm quite comfortable in the value that we added through that."
Mr Roediger said the reason the report was dated 2015 and not 2016 was because "that's when all the work was done and that is when the data is from".
"At the time we did it ACN was a publicly listed company and there was no hint from the publicly available information as to what would happen a year later," he said.
"We didn't update the analysis afresh for 2016, so we wanted to signal when the data was done."
Mr Roediger said the aim of the report was to describe the competitive market in which TAFE was operating.
"At no stage did we say ACN is a benchmark that TAFE should aim to emulate," he said.
Greens MP David Shoebridge, who obtained information about the report including its cost under freedom of information laws, said: "it looks like the government was only willing to pay once they got the report they wanted, signing the contract a month after the report was written".
