The agency arc explained who may act for a taxpayer; this lesson explains what exactly each actor may do. In the Self-Service Portal, that question is answered by roles — named bundles of permissions that a taxpayer attaches to each assignee or assigned tax agent. The procedural home is the Roles page of the Assignee Management module, confirmed from the local SSP External Guide: "Roles — set the access permissions that can be granted to assignees. Typical roles: read-only viewer, return preparer, return submitter, payment authoriser." The companion rules are equally concrete: assignees are registered, searched, viewed, edited, deactivated and removed on the Assignees page; tax agents receive predefined roles via Tax Agent Assignment; the visible module menu changes with the session ("all modules available subject to user role"); and the hygiene trio — "review the assignees list at least quarterly, restrict permissions to the minimum needed, and never share an SSP user account between people" — is stated in terms in the guide.
The legal framework is richer than beginners expect, because the Income Tax Act [Chapter 23:06] contains an entire electronic-administration code — Part VIIIA, Sections 80B–80L (inserted by the Finance Act 12 of 2006 w.e.f. 1 January 2007) — that maps almost one-to-one onto the SSP's role architecture, and every provision below is confirmed verbatim from the 27 May 2025 source Act. Section 80E prescribes the user agreement between ZIMRA and registered users, which must cover the allocation of digital signatures, the user's duty to "ensure the security of the digital signatures allocated to them", ZIMRA's access for verification and audit, and electronic record-keeping. Section 80F governs registration of registered users: no person may communicate with the Commissioner through the system unless registered (Section 80F(1)); approval depends on the applicant introducing "adequate measures to prevent disclosure of the digital signature … to any person not authorised to affix such signature" and to safeguard data integrity (Section 80F(3)); and registration may be suspended or cancelled on grounds (a)–(h) — breach of the user agreement, false statements, non-use, contravention of the Act, conviction (including offences of dishonesty), sequestration/liquidation, cessation of business — but only after notice, reasons and "a reasonable opportunity to respond" (Section 80F(5), the audi alteram partem safeguard). Section 80G requires every digital signature to be "unique to the registered user and under the sole control of the registered user", verifiable, and integrity-linked so that tampering invalidates it — and, critically for this lesson, obliges the Commissioner to allocate signatures "for the user and each employee of the user nominated in the user agreement" (Section 80G(2)): the statute itself contemplates per-person credentials inside one organisation, which is exactly what the role system operationalises. Section 80J then supplies the liability architecture: a user whose signature is compromised must tell the Commissioner "without delay" (Section 80J(1)); until that notification, ZIMRA "shall be entitled to assume" that data signed with the signature came with the user's authority (Section 80J(2)); and in any proceedings it is presumed, in the absence of proof to the contrary, that the signature was used with the consent and authority of the registered user (Section 80J(3)). Section 80K preserves paper fallback when systems are down, and Section 80L criminalises unauthorised use of another's digital signature and electronic falsification at level 12 / ten years' imprisonment.
Read together, the statute and the SSP say the same thing from two directions. The law says: credentials are personal, their security is your duty, and what is done under them is yours until you prove otherwise. The system says: give each human their own login, give each login only the role it needs, and review the grant book quarterly. This lesson builds the standard role taxonomy (viewer / preparer / submitter / payment authoriser) into a segregation-of-duties design for each taxpayer size, pairs it with the two-deep submission rule from earlier lessons, and works through scenarios — the owner-operator who holds everything, the SME splitting preparer from submitter, the corporate treasury enforcing maker-checker on payments, and the fraud post-mortem in which Section 80J(3) decides who carries a rogue submission. Case law on the SSP role system is absent (stated honestly); Hilmax Enterprises 22-HH-832 and the Part VIIIA framework supply the nearest litigated terrain. Screen-level specifics beyond the guide's confirmed text are flagged for verification against the SSP help.
