The New Zealand Qualifications Authority is conducting an investigation into an alleged "commercial cheating service", where foreign students were reportedly able to pay for their assignments to be done online.
A former employee of the company in question, Assignment 4U, claimed to have written to several institutions, including the NZQA, warning them about the service but received no replies, Radio New Zealand reported.
Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce said he was not informed about the service because an investigation failed to find sufficient evidence to proceed.
An internal investigation was underway at the NZQA to find out why he was not kept in the loop.
"My understanding is they investigated at the time and didn't have enough evidence to proceed further," Mr Joyce said.
"The question will be whether this particular allegation is what the person alleges it is, which is a commercial cheating service."
NZQA had been in touch with the Sunday Star-Times, which broke the story, asking them to share information.
The language website reportedly wrote papers for international tertiary students attending universities, polytechnics and other tertiary institutions.
The former employee who made the allegations, who wanted to remain anonymous, told Radio New Zealand he worked for the company in 2007, writing essays that were then bought by international students.
"People are trying to find ways to get through the system as effortlessly as possible," he said.
Prime Minister John Key said he would be concerned if this proved to be true.
"The allegation's a very strong one - essentially that there's a commercial cheating arrangement - and that would be damaging for us," he told Newstalk ZB.
"It's also worth remembering that we do have universities that spend a lot of time making sure that they do have systems to track the authentic nature of the assignments that students put in and we've got a very good international reputation."
According to the Assignment 4U website, which was this afternoon still up and running, its goal was to give students academic counselling and help.
"We have over one hundred high-level professional academic advisers to provide you with high-quality jobs covering all subjects and academic counselling, warm and friendly customer service staff to provide after-sales or pre-sales consulting online or offline."
