Deceased estates and probate sales: who you actually verify

The seller on a probate sale is not a living person. There's no one to sit across the desk from and match to a driver's licence, because the person who owned the property has died.

Your agency still has a designated service to provide, a sale to run, and a CDD obligation attached to it. So who do you actually identify and verify?

The fastest way to have this covered

The answer, in short: you verify the executor (or administrator) as an individual, and you record who they're acting for.

Sign up, around 2 minutes. Enter your ABN and AML Simple pulls your registered business details from the ABR automatically.
AUSTRAC Readiness Check, around 5 minutes. Shows exactly where your agency's program stands against Tranche 2 obligations, including customer due diligence.
Client screening, add the executor as an individual client, complete their identity verification the same way you would for any individual seller, and record that they're acting for another party (the estate), naming the deceased and the estate.

That's the hard part done: you have a verified individual on file, plus a clear record that they were acting in a representative capacity, rather than a file that just says "executor" with nothing behind it.

Who you're actually verifying

Current guidance on individual customer identification asks for four things: full legal name, date of birth, residential address, and whether the person is acting for another party. If they are, you identify that other party too.

An executor or administrator on a probate sale fits that fourth field directly. They are a natural person, they can produce standard ID, and they are acting for another party, the estate. Practically, that means:

The executor or administrator is the individual you verify. Same identity documents as any other individual client: an Australian driver's licence, passport, or one of the accepted alternatives if they don't hold photo ID.
The estate is the party they're acting for, and current guidance says you identify that party when a customer discloses they're acting on behalf of someone else. What "identify the estate" means in practice, beyond naming it and the deceased, isn't spelled out in the individual-identification rules we've verified. This is a genuine gap in what's currently settled, not something we're going to paper over with an invented document list.
Beneficiaries aren't the customer in the transaction the same way a beneficial owner of a company or trust is. The designated service, brokering the sale, is being provided in relation to the executor's dealings with your agency, not directly to each beneficiary. If a beneficiary is also acting as executor, or becomes a party to the transaction in some other capacity, verify them in that capacity as you would any individual.

What stands in for a normal ID check

Nothing does, for the executor themselves. They still produce a driver's licence or passport like any other individual seller. What's different is proving they have the legal authority to sell on the estate's behalf, and that's a separate question from identity.

In general Australian probate practice, that authority is usually evidenced by a grant of probate (where there's a will naming an executor) or letters of administration (where there isn't, or the named executor can't act), issued by the relevant state or territory Supreme Court. That's a statement about how probate works generally, not an AML/CTF-specific requirement we've verified against AUSTRAC guidance or the AML/CTF Rules 2025. We haven't found a deceased-estate-specific evidence list in the guidance we hold, and we're not going to publish one that we've made up.

The practical position: keep the executor's individual verification on file, keep a copy of whatever document establishes their authority to act (grant of probate, letters of administration, or equivalent), and record that pairing against the client file. If you're unsure whether that's sufficient for a specific matter, that's a question for your solicitor or AML/CTF compliance professional, not something to guess at on a live file.

Doing it yourself

If you're not using a tool for this, the same steps still apply manually:

Collect the executor's or administrator's identity information directly, the same as any individual client
Record that they're acting for another party, naming the deceased and the estate
File a copy of the document establishing their authority to act alongside the identity verification
Keep every record for 7 years, per the general record-keeping obligation in AML/CTF Act 2006 s 107
Where the estate's structure or the file's circumstances are genuinely unclear, get a specific answer from a qualified professional rather than proceeding on an assumption

Penalties for non-compliance can reach up to A$36,400,000 per contravention for a body corporate, or up to A$7,280,000 per contravention for an individual, under AML/CTF Act 2006 s 175.

The point that matters

A probate sale doesn't remove your CDD obligation. It changes who's standing in front of you. Verify the executor as the individual they are, record who they're acting for, and don't let the absence of a living seller become the absence of a record. Get started free and have the executor's file set up correctly from the first contact.

Related reading: beneficial ownership in real estate covers the same "who's the real party" question for company and trust buyers, and CDD for trust-owned property covers another client type with no ABN and no face to match to a licence.