The regulations on administrative procedure allow the actions of interested parties to be carried out through a representative, a condition that may be proven by any legally valid means that provides reliable evidence of its existence (article 5 of Law 39/2015, of October 1).

Among others, two of these means are i) the accreditation of the registration of the representation in an electronic register of powers of attorney (such as REPRESENTA) and, ii) the qualified electronic certificate of representative (article 32 of Royal Decree 203/2021, of March 30).

In practice, especially when the interested parties are legal entities (and therefore, obligated parties to the electronic relationship), the use of representative certificates is common.

In this case, doubts may arise about the need, or not, to register the representation contained in the electronic certificate in REPRESENTA.

It should be noted that the qualified electronic certificate of representative is issued in compliance with the regulations governing trust services, which require verification of the representation relationship (Regulation 910/2014 (ReIDAS) and Law 6/2020, of November 11).

Therefore, since these certificates already accredit, by themselves, the representation relationship that exists between two people, it is not necessary to register the representations in REPRESENTA.

Common errors regarding representative certificates

When you try to register the representation that appears in a representative certificate, that is, when you try to register that the natural person that appears in the certificate represents the legal person that appears in it, the platform returns a warning: It is not possible to register this combination of NIFs.

This is so, given that as indicated in the previous section of this same FAQ, the representative certificate already accredits the representation relationship that exists between these two people, therefore, it is not necessary to register this representation in the REPRESENTA.

The same thing happens in reverse, when an attempt is made to register that the legal person listed on the certificate represents the natural person listed on it, given that it is a representation that does not apply.