E-file Instructions for registered approval authorities

When an appellant submits an appeal to your approval authority, the submitted appeal will appear in the e-file Approval Authority Dashboard under the heading "Appeals Pending Review”. See screenshot below:

Select the appeal to verify the information submitted by clicking on the Appeal ID, as marked on the screenshot below.

A new screen will appear entitled “Approval Authority Review of Appeal Submission”. To display the details of the submitted appeal, click Show More Details, as indicated in the screenshot below. This will expand the screen to show all the information that the appellant has submitted.

Once you’ve reviewed this screen, scroll to the top of the page and click the button that now says Hide More Details (see screenshot below). This will collapse the screen to hide all the appeal information, so you can easily see the Save Review button at the bottom of the screen.

Change the status of the appeal to indicate you have finished your review by selecting “Reviewed” or “Reviewed – Issues” from the drop-down menu under Review Status). Otherwise, if you’re not yet finished reviewing or are only conducting the initial review, you can select “Review in Progress.” See screenshot below.

Next click Save Review at the bottom of the screen:

You will now be taken back to the “Appeals Pending Review” screen. If you have additional appeals to review, you can do so now. It is advisable to wait until the appeal expiry period has ended before continuing to the next step. This is because you may receive additional appeals over the course of the appeal period on the same matter, and you’ll want to review and group them together before you proceed to the case information step. Please note that after you’ve saved a review of an appeal, it will move to the “Appeals Reviewed” page in the Approval Authority Dashboard tab.

The next step is to create a case and add any required information about the case before forwarding to the OLT. A case package may contain one appeal or multiple related appeals depending how many appeals the approval authority receives on a matter.

Under the Approval Authority Dashboard, select “Appeals Reviewed” from the drop-down menu to see a list of all appeals that have been reviewed and saved by you or any other contacts within your approval authority from Step 1. See screenshot below.

On the Appeals Reviewed page, proceed as follows:

Follow the on-screen directions given in the portal to add information about the case. In creating a case package, e-file allows you to:

• Add the contact(s) from your office for the case.
• Add representative(s) for your approval authority, if applicable.
• Upload documents related to the case such as relevant checklist items and a cover letter.
• Provide specific information about the case (e.g., number of residential units proposed, whether the approval authority intends to appear before the Tribunal, the number and types of witnesses planned, whether appellants made their opinions on the matter known to council, etc.).

E-file will save all the information you’ve entered as you progress through the steps. If you need to stop and come back later, your saved draft will be available under “In Progress Cases” in the Approval Authority Cases tab.

If you receive an additional appeal (either on paper, through email or via e-file) after you’ve completed this step, learn how you can enter it into the case package.

Once you have entered the required data and uploaded all documents, you will review the Summary, complete the declaration statement and select Submit. You will then receive an email confirming that you have successfully forwarded the case package to OLT.

Do not submit the case package to OLT until the appeal deadline is expired in case more related appeals are filed that you need to add to the case package. Refer to the applicable legislation to determine the specific timeframe you have after the appeal deadline to submit the case to OLT. For example, some legislation may allow up to 15-20 days.

To assist the processing of your appeal, please name your saved document files using a descriptive naming convention, such as:

I. the appellant's last name or corporation/organization name
II. the document type
III. the date of submission (month/day/year)

For example: “SmithAffidavit12-05-23”.

Important: Do not use special characters in naming your documents. Special characters are any characters that are not an alphabetic or numeric character. For example: $%#!+*/@\;^”  You may upload Microsoft products (e.g., Word, Excel), PDFs, MP4s, JPEGs or other image files. Msg format and zip files are not supported. Please save any unsupported file types as PDFs before uploading to the e-file portal.

There are two ways you can do this:

If the appellant has paid by cheque, you can mail/courier the appellant’s cheque to the OLT at 655 Bay Street, Suite 1500, Toronto, ON, M5G 1E5.