If you are a principal authority or authorisation administrator, you can create authorisations for employees and other individuals to work on behalf of the business. It is your responsibility to maintain the integrity of your business records. This is to ensure:

• employees can easily identify who can authorise them
• the correct people have been authorised to access government online services on behalf of your business.

You can authorise someone as a:

• Authorisation administrator – can create and manage authorisations for others (a Basic user cannot be authorised as an authorisation administrator).
• Authorised user – can work on behalf of a business.
• Machine credential administrator (MCA) – can create and manage machine credentials to interact with government online services through business software (a Basic user cannot be authorised as an MCA).
• Basic user – can work on behalf of a business with a Basic identity strength (available for limited government online services). Basic users can only be authorised for up to 12 months and will need to be renewed if the authorisation is still required after this period.

On this page

• Before you start
• If you use a tax professional
• Creating a new authorisation
• Authorisation requests and codes

Before you start

Check with the user you are authorising that:

• they have set up their Digital ID, such as myID
• their full legal name matches the name used to set up their Digital ID
• their current business email address can only be accessed by them – this is where the authorisation request and future notifications are sent (it does not need to match the email address they used to set up their Digital ID).

Creating a new authorisation

To create a new authorisation:

1. Log in to RAM.
2. Select View or manage authorisations, machine credentials and cloud software notifications.
3. Select the business you would like to add an authorisation to.
4. Select Add new user.
5. Choose the Representative type – select either Standard user or Basic user. If the representative’s Digital ID has a Standard or Strong identity strength they’re a Standard user, if their identity strength is Basic they’re a Basic user.

Then complete the following labels:

1. Representative details – enter the user's full legal name and current business email address (it does not need to match the email address they used to set up their Digital ID).
2. Authorisation details – select Yes or No for the user to be an authorisation administrator or an MCA (for a Standard user only). Enter a start and end date or it will default to no end date – this can’t be backdated and for a Basic user, can be no longer than 12 months from the authorisation date.
3. Agency access – grant access for each agency or service by selecting the checkbox. If an agency supports service selection, a ‘Select services’ prompt is displayed next to the agency name and both agency-level and service-level checkboxes are available. Otherwise, only agency-level checkboxes are active. Select View services to expand the list of service checkboxes.
4. Summary – review details and accept the Declaration. Select Show details for the full agency list.

A new authorisation needs to be created when changing the authorisation of a Basic user to a Standard user. Once accepted, the status of the Basic authorisation will change to ‘Inactive – Overridden’.

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