The Australian this morning is giving a lot of attention to this paper by Neil Warren and Richard Highfield on HELP repayment.

It is a good paper, analysing ‘bunching’ of HELP debtor incomes below important repayment thresholds. The significance of this (for both the government and the debtor) is that if the debtor’s income crosses one of the thresholds they have to pay a higher percentage of all their income in repayment.

This has turned out to be a valuable aspect of HELP’s repayment system compared to those of other countries, where students pay at the margins (eg 9% of income above the threshold). In Australia, anyone who consistently earns above the initial threshold (about $53K this year) is likely to eventually repay all their debt, as they will pay back $2,000+ each year. But in other countries, earnings slightly above the threshold result in only very small repayments. This is one reason that, bad as Australia’s student doubtful debt figures are, they are not as bad as England’s.

However, because crossing a threshold has a high cash cost there are temptations to keep income below it. I have to admit that long ago I considered turning down a pay increase because I thought it would reduce my take-home pay more than I can afford, as someone who at the time had a very tight financial situation. In the end, what was to my boss a generous increase boosted my take-home pay by some token amount (and of course sped up my HECS repayment). What Highfield and Warren present is evidence that some people are using deductions for education, work and charity to bring their taxable income below thresholds.

Their policy suggestion is to change the definition of HELP repayment income so that some or all of these deductions are not included. This is a strategy the government has adopted before to tackle negative gearing and fringe benefits. I need to think more about the education and work deductions, but support removing charitable deductions (the taxpayer would still get the deduction for income tax purposes).

Another suggestion is to revisit the issue of discounts for paying student contributions upfront. The discount was cut from 25 per cent to 20 per cent in 2005, and then to 10 per cent in 2012, with a bill to eliminate it entirely stalled in the Senate. Money never lent will never cause repayment problems, so this has an obvious attraction – if the savings from the reduced lending outweigh the discount’s cost.

However, I am not convinced that the discount is having a big enough effect in encouraging up-front payment to warrant keeping it. The proportion of students paying upfront is in long-term decline, as seen in the chart below. The halving of the discount in 2012 did cause the biggest year-to-year decline in upfront payment in this time series, but it really only sped the trend up, rather than marking an obvious major turning point. We are talking perhaps about 1 to 2 extra percentage points of students paying upfront if they had a stronger financial incentive.

Cutting the discount has been based in part on the assumption that many of the people paying upfront are not principally motivated by a financial calculation. They are parents paying for their kids, employers paying for their staff, or individuals who don’t want to hold debt even on very low interest rates. Overall, the government is probably better off trying to collect the full student contribution amount via HELP than giving windfall gains to people who will pay upfront anyway.

While it has always made sense to borrow under HECS or HELP, due to the very favourable lending conditions, I am not entirely sure why we are seeing such a strong trend. An increasing share of low SES students might explain some of it, but I suspect there is more going on.