LONDON — A BBC investigation has raised fresh doubts about the evidence used to throw thousands of people out of the UK for allegedly cheating in an English language test.

Whistleblower testimony and official documents obtained by Newsnight reveal the Home Office has continued to try to remove people based on the claims of the international testing organisation ETS - despite knowing of serious concerns about its conduct and flaws in its data.

More than 2,500 people were deported and at least 7,200 more were forced to leave Britain after ETS accused them of cheating in an exam it set and marked. Others who remain in the UK continue to fight to clear their names after enduring years of hardship.

The crackdown was sparked by a 2014 BBC Panorama investigation that revealed two London test centres were running fraudulent exams so people could falsely obtain a pass they could use to apply for a visa.

Following those revelations, the government asked ETS to assess the scale of student cheating across more than 100 independent centres, which were contracted as test venues.

ETS gave them a massive list of alleged cheats, but despite proof that this included some innocent people who had been wrongly accused, the Home Office continues to stand by ETS's evidence.

Labour MP Stephen Timms said: "Clearly, ETS was a discredited witness and yet the Home Office relied on them totally."

The BBC has also uncovered further evidence — much of which has been known to the department for several years — which raises additional questions about why ETS has been trusted to investigate what went on.

In the new investigation — by the same journalists who exposed the original fraud — the BBC revealed:

Past and present ETS staff told the Home Office they had found significant evidence of organised cheating almost two years before it was exposed by Panorama

They told Home Office investigators their efforts to close some fraudulent test centres were blocked by managers who were worried test fee income would fall

From these accounts, the Home Office learned it had been kept in the dark about the fraud

Investigators were also given eyewitness testimony that some tests were faked with a method known as "remote testing", which lawyers believe undermines ETS's evidence.

The chair of the Public Accounts Committee, Labour MP Meg Hillier, told the BBC: "Given what you found, I think the Home Office can no longer rely on this ETS data."

Dame Meg said the government's actions have created "huge injustice" and it should now drop outstanding legal action against alleged cheats, most of whom came to Britain as international students. She suggested they should instead be allowed to sit fresh English tests for new visas.

Wahidur Rahman, who won a seven-year battle to overturn the Home Office's allegations against him, said: "They should hang their heads in shame for not apologising, not just to me but all the other innocent students."

Many alleged cheats were thrown out of Britain without any opportunity to challenge or even see the evidence against them.

The Home Office simply cancelled their visas, with no right to appeal in Britain.

Nomi Raja was 22 when immigration officers raided his student house in June 2014. "They asked me for my ID. Then this guy had a radio and he was like: 'Target achieved.'"

Only when he arrived at a detention centre at Gatwick Airport did an officer reveal why he had been arrested: "She's like, 'You've done Toeic, you have cheated and then we are sending you back to Pakistan'." Toeic – Test of English for International Communication – was the name of the exam set by ETS.

Mr Raja managed to halt his deportation and was released after 125 days. But like others who protested their innocence, he was banned from working, studying or using the NHS.

Many became estranged from relatives who didn't believe the British government would make such shameful allegations without good reason.

Finding themselves unwelcome both in Britain and back home was devastating for those affected, said Nazek Ramadan, director of the charity Migrant Voice. "Most of them have mental health issues and some were on medication to stop them killing themselves," she said.

The 2014 Panorama followed a tip-off that bogus students who spoke virtually no English were being offered "guaranteed" Toeic exam passes at two London test centres.

An undercover researcher secretly filmed an exam in East London where test centre staff provided every candidate with a paid cheat, or proxy, who spoke good English. The tests were then uploaded to ETS in the US for marking.

Panorama's undercover footage shocked then Home Secretary Theresa May. "I want to do something about it," she said at the time.

Her department had revoked the licences of hundreds of colleges to sponsor international students to come to the UK, because they were suspected of being a cover for immigration fraud. Investigations were now launched into Toeic fraud.

ETS, also now under scrutiny, offered to help with voice recognition software. It looked to see if the same voice turned up on multiple test recordings, indicating the same proxy had faked exams for several people.

If a test was flagged and two ETS staff agreed, it was classified as "invalid" - meaning the candidate had definitely cheated. Even if that didn't indicate cheating, ETS might designate a test as "questionable" if it was taken at a centre with many "invalid" results.

The final results were startling: 97% of 58,000 Toeics taken in Britain between 2011 and 2014 were judged suspicious — 33,663 were invalid and 22,476 questionable.

If that had been accurate, it would have represented the largest exam cheating scandal in British history.

A huge list of names was passed to the Home Office which revoked the visa of anybody with an invalid test. It wasn't until 2017 that people in Toeic cases won the right to appeal in Britain.

In 2016, two years after the deportations started, ETS began providing alleged cheats with their test recordings.

In addition to concerns about the reliability of ETS's data there are also worrying questions about what the Home Office knows about the organisation itself.

The BBC can reveal that inspectors from the international arm of ETS - ETS Global BV, which oversaw the British operation - had been finding significant evidence of organised cheating at some test centres for almost two years before it was publicly exposed by Panorama.

Two people who worked for ETS in the UK say the Home Office was kept in the dark about the fraud at the time to ensure Toeic kept its government licence for visa applications.

Following the Panorama broadcast, they were interviewed by Home Office investigators and the department learned shocking details about what had been known about the scale of the fraud in some locations.

In a statement ETS said it took prompt action when it was made aware of serious allegations about UK tests in 2014, including significant changes to the management team of ETS Global BV.

Inspectors believed some centres had remote access software that allowed test computers to be secretly controlled from other rooms.

Immigration barrister Nick Armstrong said it would have been simpler for fraudsters to discard all the test entries from the exam hall - including those by genuine candidates - and just upload those from a secret room. The same faked test could be sent for multiple candidates, he believes.

This meant that when the recordings were scrutinised with voice recognition software, people who thought they had passed on their own merits would be wrongly branded cheats.

"It is an explanation for why the numbers of so-called fraudulent tests were as high as they were found to be," Mr Armstrong said.

In a statement the Home Office said it "has been, and continues to be, completely transparent with select committee requests for information".

In 2018 ETS Global BV paid a £1.6m settlement to the department, but by then the Toeic scandal had already cost taxpayers £21m. Twenty-five people who faked tests have been convicted, including 11 involved with the frauds Panorama filmed.

The government is continuing to contest Immigration appeals against accusations based on ETS's evidence. But by 2019 more than 3700 people had won their cases. Immigration barrister Paul Turner says: "I think the government will die in a ditch defending ETS's data. But the courts are finding that an awful lot of people did not cheat."

In February 2021 the Home Secretary Priti Patel told MPs she accepted some innocent people had been wrongly accused. "We need to find a resolution and actually to bring not just clarification, but some justice around what has happened."

She promised to look at solutions after the conclusion of a test case, but a year on that judgement is still awaited.

However, the Home Office doesn't accept there are major flaws in ETS's evidence.

In a statement it said it had consistently been found that the evidence it had at the time was sufficient to take immigration enforcement action. "Where somebody's test has been identified as having been taken by use of a proxy test taker, they are able to challenge a consequent adverse decision by taking it to either judicial review or appeal, which is independent of the Government."

The department added that it had made significant improvements to ensure large-scale abuse could never happen again. — BBC