Checklist · Mergers & Acquisitions / Private Equity
FIRB application information checklist and cover letter
Screening questions, an information checklist for a foreign investment application, and a cover letter template to the Treasury’s Foreign Investment Division, with prompts for national security and tax issues.
- Kind
- Checklist. Steps or checks to work through and tick off.
- Where it applies
- Australia
- AI use
- Red Keep AI out of the decisive steps. A lawyer does the work.
- Law stated as at
- 17 October 2026
- Status
- Maintained. Checked on 17 October 2026 against the 3 authorities it cites, for Australia.
- Version
- 1
- Source
- Written for this library. Licence: FIRB guidance is CC BY 4.0 (© Commonwealth of Australia; Coat of Arms, logo and third-party content excluded); linked, not reproduced.
When to use it
Use when a foreign person, including a foreign government investor, proposes to acquire interests in Australian entities, businesses or land. Treasury guidance and thresholds change; check the current guidance notes before relying on any screening answer.
How AI may be used
Lawyer-led. AI may organise the investor’s ownership information and pre-fill factual fields. Foreign person, national security and tax judgements stay with the lawyer.
AI may
- Build an ownership chain table from structure charts and registers, with sources for each entry
- Pre-fill factual application fields and list facts with no source document
- Draft the cover letter’s factual description from the transaction documents
AI must not
- Must not decide whether the investor is a foreign person or foreign government investor
- Must not decide whether the target carries on a national security business or whether thresholds are met
- Must not process sensitive information about the investor’s government links or security matters in an unapproved tool
The lawyer checks
- Ownership chain traced to ultimate controllers, including government interests, with evidence
- Current monetary thresholds and fee schedule applied
- Proposed conditions and undertakings are ones the client has authorised
Method: how the Green, Yellow and Red levels are decided. This is guidance for planning, not legal advice.
Official form
Open the official form. Always use the current version from the issuer. Licence: FIRB guidance is CC BY 4.0 (© Commonwealth of Australia; Coat of Arms, logo and third-party content excluded); linked, not reproduced..
Read the full text
The full text is for signed-in accounts. It is free. When you sign in you can:
- read the whole precedent, with its drafting notes beside it;
- copy it, or download it as a Word file or Markdown;
- add it to your firm’s knowledge base, so colleagues can find it;
- let the AI tools you connect read it from that knowledge base.
The summary, the law it rests on and the AI-use guidance above stay public. Privacy.
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