Your myGov Account Dies With You. Your Super Might Go to the Wrong Person

Your myGov account is the single most consequential login in your Australian life. Tax, Medicare, Centrelink, your super, the Australian Immunisation Register, My Health Record, one username, one password, one place. It is also, when you die, completely worthless to your family.

A deceased person's myGov account cannot be inherited, transferred, or accessed by an executor. The credentials are personal and non-transferable, and there is no legacy contact, no nominated representative, no "in the event of death" setting anywhere in it. Every service the deceased reached through that one portal has to be approached separately, from the outside, by someone proving their authority from scratch.

Most families discover this at the worst possible moment, and it costs them weeks.

The problem: consolidation without succession

The Australian government spent a decade doing something genuinely useful, pulling scattered agency logins into a single front door. The unintended consequence is that most Australians now have no idea which agencies actually hold their information, because they have not visited any of those agencies directly in years. They visit myGov.

So when someone dies, the executor is handed an estate whose government-facing surface is invisible. Was there a Centrelink payment? An unlodged tax return? A Medicare rebate owing? A DVA entitlement? The person who could have answered that in ten seconds is gone, and the portal that knew is sealed.

Start here: the Australian Death Notification Service

Before anything else, use the Australian Death Notification Service. It is free, it is run by the Australian Registrars, and it lets you notify many participating organisations of a death in one submission, government agencies, banks, insurers, superannuation funds, utilities and telcos among them.

Be precise about what it does, though, because the name oversells it slightly. It notifies. It does not close accounts, release records, transfer anything, or grant you access. It tells organisations the person has died so they can start their own process, which is genuinely valuable, it stops payments, flags accounts, and prevents the slow-motion mess of a dead person's direct debits running for months. But every organisation still has its own separate process for actually dealing with you.

The ATO: notification, then authority, then lodgement

Dealing with the ATO for a deceased estate happens in a strict order, and skipping a step means starting again.

Notify the ATO of the death. There is a specific process for this, separate from the ADNS notification, and it requires supporting documentation. Allow several weeks for it to be processed.

Become the authorised legal personal representative. This is the step that unlocks everything else, and it needs a grant of probate if you are the executor named in the will, or letters of administration if you are an administrator appointed by the court. Once the ATO records you as the authorised LPR, you become the authorised contact for both the deceased individual and the deceased estate. A registered tax agent can then act on the estate's behalf if you engage one.

Lodge the date-of-death return. A final return covers the period from 1 July to the date of death, lodged under the deceased's tax file number. If the estate continues to earn income after death, interest, dividends, rent, a separate trust tax return for the deceased estate is also required, potentially for several years while the estate is administered.

Note what is not on that list: logging into the deceased's myGov to have a look. That is not a shortcut, it is not authorised, and it puts a well-meaning executor on the wrong side of both the ATO's access rules and the Commonwealth Criminal Code provisions on unauthorised access to computer data.

Services Australia: probate first, information second

Centrelink and Medicare records follow a similar shape. Services Australia will provide information to an executor or administrator, but it needs proof of authority, the grant of probate or letters of administration, together with its executor and administrator request form. There is no path through the deceased's own account.

The practical implication is worth stating plainly: until probate is granted, the executor is largely locked out of the entire government layer of the estate. In a straightforward estate that is a matter of weeks. In a contested or complex one it can be months, during which time deadlines continue to run.

Superannuation: the biggest asset, and it is not in the will

Here is where the most money goes wrong, because superannuation does not behave like other assets.

Super is generally not an estate asset. It is held on trust by the fund trustee, and it does not automatically flow into the estate to be distributed under the will. Under the SIS legislation, a death benefit can only be paid to a dependant of the member or to the member's legal personal representative. If it goes to the LPR, it enters the estate and is distributed under the will. If it goes directly to a dependant, it bypasses the estate entirely, and bypasses the will with it.

Who decides? The trustee, unless you have told them otherwise with a valid binding death benefit nomination. A binding nomination compels the trustee to follow it. A non-binding or preferential nomination is merely a suggestion the trustee may consider and may disregard.

The trap is expiry. Under the SIS Regulations, binding nominations with APRA-regulated funds are generally lapsing, they expire three years from the date of signing unless renewed. Some funds and most self-managed funds permit non-lapsing nominations under their governing rules, but you cannot assume yours does.

Which means a binding nomination signed in 2021, never revisited, may have quietly stopped binding anyone in 2024. The member believes their super is directed. It is not. The trustee, who has never met the family, will decide, applying the SIS definition of dependant, which covers a spouse including a de facto partner, any child including stepchildren and adult children, anyone in an interdependency relationship, and anyone financially dependent at the date of death. That is a wide net, and it does not necessarily catch the people you would have chosen.

Then there is the super nobody is tracking at all. As at 30 June 2025 the ATO held or recorded $18.9 billion in lost and unclaimed superannuation across just under 7.3 million accounts, an average of roughly $2,590 each. Every one of those accounts belongs to someone whose family will not know to look for it.

The checklist, in order

1. Notify through the ADNS to start the process at many organisations at once.
2. Order multiple certified death certificates. Nearly every organisation wants one and many will not return it. Ten is not excessive.
3. Apply for probate or letters of administration. Nothing meaningful with the ATO, Services Australia or most super funds moves until this exists.
4. Notify the ATO separately and register as the authorised LPR once you have the grant.
5. Contact every super fund directly. Ask specifically whether a binding death benefit nomination is on file, whether it is lapsing or non-lapsing, and when it was signed.
6. Run a lost super search for the deceased once you have LPR authority. It is a routine step that regularly finds real money.
7. Lodge the date-of-death return and, if the estate earns income, the estate's trust return.

And the ten minutes that saves your family all of this

Almost every delay above traces back to one thing: nobody knew what existed. Not what the passwords were, what existed.

So write it down. Which super funds you hold, and whether each has a current binding nomination. Which government agencies actually hold something of yours. Whether you lodge your own tax return or use an agent, and who that agent is. Where the will is and who the executor is.

Then check your binding death benefit nomination and put a three-year reminder in your calendar to check it again. It is the single highest-value ten minutes in Australian estate planning, it costs nothing, and it directs what is often the largest asset a household owns outside the family home.

myGov consolidated your government life brilliantly. It just never built the door your family will need.