THE mother-daughter duo found guilty of two counts each of obtaining financial advantage from South West TAFE by deception have been sentenced with the mother being immediately jailed for eight months.

Rebecca Taylor, 55, who was the director of third-party training provider TayTell, and her daughter Heather Snelleksz, 39, pleaded guilty in the Melbourne County Court in October and were sentenced on Monday.

Upon release, Taylor will be placed on a corrections order that will run for four years and involve 400 hours of unpaid community work. Snelleksz was deemed to have played a lesser role in the scam so did not receive a jail sentence but was placed on a three-year order with 250 hours of unpaid work.

The mother and daughter scammed more than $2 million from Warrnambool’s South West TAFE and Kangan Institute in Bendigo in 2013 and 2014.

The money was purportedly paid in exchange for training and assessing hundreds of students for an engineering course which never occurred.

Enrolment forms and assessment workbooks were falsified in a process Taylor described in text messages at the time as a ‘sausage factory’.

Judge Gerard Mullaly said the messages were shameful and revealed Taylor’s “greed and clear knowledge” of a “plainly dishonest scheme”.

In October, former South West TAFE executive manager, Maurice Molan, escaped a conviction for misconduct in public office for appointing Taylor despite her not holding the minimum credentials required to teach. He was fined $2500.

Altogether, four people were initially charged in the scam with a total of 55 offences including conspiracy to defraud.

Nicola Clifford was previously charged but after filing an application of discontinuance earlier this year asking prosecutors in the Melbourne County Court not to pursue the matter, the Office of Public Prosecutions officially discontinued her case.

Taylor and Snelleksz will remain under the supervision of the Office of Corrections while their orders are in place.