The documents checklist: everything the ATO will ask a non-resident for

Ana sells ceramics from Porto and is about to start an ABN application. She has half an hour and good intentions. What she does not have is a folder — and this video is that folder, assembled before she opens the form, because the order of those two things is the difference between one submission and three.

A quick word on why the folder-first order matters so much here specifically. Most online forms let you save and return. This process has a different shape: an incomplete or inconsistent submission doesn't pause, it gets reviewed, returned, and re-queued — and the queue treats a resubmission as a new arrival. So the cost of missing one document isn't the ten minutes to find it. It's the review cycle you've just spent.

Everything the ATO asks a non-resident for exists to answer three questions: does this entity exist, who controls it, and what is it doing in Australia. Every document on the list maps to one of those three. Knowing which one a document is answering tells you immediately whether you've got a gap — and gaps are what send an application back.

Set one: the entity exists. Your certificate of incorporation or equivalent registration document. Your articles or constitution. Where your company sits under a holding structure, the documents that show that chain — and the register will want the real people at the end of it, not another company name.

Set two: who controls it. Identification for each director, and for anyone with a controlling interest — typically passport, sometimes a second document. Ana is a sole director, so this is one person. A company with four directors across three countries is four sets, four certifications, and the coordination is the slow part rather than the paperwork.

Set three: what you're doing in Australia. This is the one sellers under-prepare because it feels like the obvious part. A description of the business activity. Where the goods are — your fulfilment centre agreement or warehousing contract. Which channels you sell through. When the Australian activity started, and that date should match what your marketplace and import records would show.

Then certification, which we covered in its own video but belongs on the checklist. Copies of identity and entity documents need certifying by someone in an approved category — outside Australia, usually a notary or an Australian consular official. The endorsement has to say true copy of the original, and carry the certifier's name, capacity, signature and date. Missing any one of those four sends the page back.

Anything not in English needs an accredited translation, travelling with the original rather than replacing it. Ana's incorporation certificate is Portuguese, so that's one translation — and worth doing before the notary appointment rather than after, so the whole bundle gets handled once.

Then the thing that isn't on any checklist and causes more queries than any missing page: consistency. The entity name on your incorporation certificate, on your marketplace account, on your import declarations and on your application should all be the same entity, spelled the same way. Where they've drifted — a trading name here, an abbreviation there — a reviewer sees three entities rather than one. Reconciling that before you apply is worth more than any single document.

Then the details that aren't documents but stop the form dead if you don't have them ready. The exact legal name of the entity as registered — not the trading name. Your foreign company number or equivalent. A business address and a postal address. Contact details for the person the ATO can reach. And the date Australian activity began.

The legal-name-versus-trading-name point deserves its own moment, because it's a quiet killer. Your marketplace store is called something. Your company is called something else. The register wants the something else, spelled exactly as it appears on the incorporation certificate, including the legal suffix. A mismatch here reads as a different entity and gets queried.

If you're going straight on to GST registration — and a warehousing seller is — add a second short list now while you're assembling. The effective date you intend to use. Your reporting cycle. Cash or accruals. And your rolling twelve-month Australian turnover figure, which you'll need for the threshold question and which takes longest to produce because it spans every channel.

One practical note on format, since it costs people a second round. Certified copies are usually submitted as scans, and a scan that loses the certifier's stamp to a shadow, or crops the endorsement at the page edge, is functionally uncertified. Scan flat, in colour, at a sensible resolution, and check that every endorsement is legible in the file you're actually attaching — not in the original on your desk.

One habit that pays later: keep the certified bundle as a set, scanned and filed together. You'll be asked for this material again — marketplace verification, banking, sometimes the GST registration itself — and a bundle that has already satisfied the ATO is worth far more in a folder than reassembled from memory six months on.

So the order Ana should actually work in, which is the reverse of instinct. Gather the details. Gather the documents. Translate what needs translating. Certify the whole bundle in one appointment. Then — and only then — open the application. A complete submission is reviewed once; an incomplete one goes to the back of a queue that doesn't remember it saw you.

Realistically, the gathering takes longer than the form by an order of magnitude. Ana's half hour was accurate — for the form. The folder took her the better part of a week, most of it waiting on a notary appointment and a translator. That week is the actual project, and budgeting for it is the difference between a smooth application and a frustrated one.

This whole list is public and this whole process is free — nothing here requires an agent, and plenty of sellers assemble it themselves. What an agent adds is knowing, before you book the notary, exactly which documents your country's paperwork needs to produce for an Australian reviewer. The team at Epic Tax are Australian registered tax agents who prepare these bundles for overseas sellers. General information only, not tax advice.