Giving someone authority to act on your behalf

Restoring or importing a car can be a challenging, yet rewarding experience. There’s a lot involved so you’ve decided you’ll need help to make it happen. You’ve found someone you trust, but you’ll need to give them permission to import or restore the car for you. This legal permission is called an authority to act.

What does an authority to act do?

When you provide an authority to act, you’re giving that person or company official permission to do certain tasks on your behalf. This includes completing and submitting applications, and making declarations and payments.

You can authorise any person or organisation representative you trust to act on your behalf. This includes a family member, a friend, a neighbour, an import agent, or a registered automotive workshop.

What does an RVS authority to act look like?

Under the new Road Vehicle Standards (RVS) legislation, all applications and approvals are managed through ROVER, the department’s online portal. This includes giving an authority to act.

You can, through ROVER, provide an authority to act for any individual. You will only need to provide an email address so that we can email them an invitation to act on your behalf. However, you will need to have already created a ROVER account and provided 100 points of identification to verify your identity (and have your identity verified by the department) before you can provide this authority.

Alternatively, they can request to act on your behalf via ROVER. In this case, they will need an email address for you. You will need to create a ROVER account in order to accept the request in ROVER. You won’t need to verify your identity in order to accept the request. But before they can submit an application on your behalf, you will need to provide 100 points of identification via ROVER and have your identity verified by the department.

When allocating someone with an authority to act on your behalf, you can:

  • Set their level of access
  • Set the functions they can do, such as create, view, update or submit applications
  • Set the timeframe for the authority (by default it is set to 2 years but you may want to shorten or exceed this timeframe).

Setting the access levels and functions protects your information in ROVER, by allowing you to control who accesses your profile, what they can do with that access and for how long.

For detailed step-by-step instructions, read the User guide to multi-level authority to act in ROVER.

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