Finger points at Taratahi leaders

SFO PROBE: The Taratahi Agricultural Training Centre has admitted improperly receiving $8.6 million.

Senior managers at the award-winning Taratahi Agricultural Training Centre knew about millions of dollars in improper funding and should "do the right thing" and quit, says a former tutor.

The former teacher, a university graduate who resigned in disgust in 2014 after five years at the centre, declined to be named for fear of jeopardising a return to the agricultural college.

His comments come after leaders at the centre admitted on Monday that $7.5 million plus GST, for a total of $8.6 million, had been improperly taken from the taxpayer purse and would be repaid.

The amount was pinpointed during a Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) investigation, which found the centre had wrangled illicit funding over a period of six years from 2009.

The probe revealed teaching hours in at least six classes that fell below required thresholds, and the enrolment of 67 tutors on a general skills course in 2013, during which "little or no teaching took place".

A Serious Fraud Office probe was triggered and is ongoing.

The former tutor was interviewed during the TEC investigation and was one of the teaching staff enrolled on the general skills course two years ago despite obvious reluctance from the tutors. He had been in the 12-week class for barely an hour, he said.

Enrolment on the course was forced on them, he said, after the expulsion or early departure of up to 40 fulltime students that year.

"They were putting pressure on us to get on the course. One guy put his foot down and refused to go and we were all very uncomfortable about it.

"The senior managers knew that and our team leader told us his hands were tied, that it was coming from above," the former tutor said.

"Don't get me wrong. I really loved working at that place but there was huge expansion and to be honest, we knew it was going to implode.

"I left because I couldn't put up with all the shenanigans going on. I just thought this is our money going to this place - yours and mine - and they're misappropriating it."

Immediate-past chief executive Donovan Wearing started at the centre in 2008 and died suddenly on January 21, weeks after the TEC probe was made public.

The former tutor said he empathised with the Wearing family and felt blame for the improper funding had to be shared among senior managers.

"The board was misled and they need to get rid of all the people that made those decisions. Donovan shouldn't be made a scapegoat. There are other senior managers in the organisation that need to do the right thing and hand in their notices," he said.

"Donovan was stressed to the max towards the end. He was very stressed out. You could tell that he was very stressed out.

"But my issue is with senior management, they need to have a clean-out. People need to resign over it. They know damn well what they've been doing."

The former tutor said Taratahi was a vital organisation to the region and country and its education delivery in the sector and tutoring staff were without peer. But morale had plummeted among teaching staff and he hoped the centre would soon win back its deserved reputation.

"The tutors out there are fantastic. You couldn't find a better bunch of guys with such passion to teach young people, and Taratahi is a great place for youth and for learning, " he said.

"It's just mismanagement, that's all. I know local farmers around here have washed their hands of it for the moment. They're just saying it's not right.

"It needs to be taken back by the stakeholders, which is the local farmers, then I'd definitely go back there as a tutor. But not under the management as it is now, that'd have to change."