Forward a notice to the authority (Anhörung)

This article explains how to forward an Anhörung (authority hearing / driver-identification request) response to the issuing authority for a Strafmandat (penalty notice), and how the built-in idempotency protection stops the same message being sent twice.

Before you forward

Forwarding is role-gated: you need the strafmandate:forward-authority permission. You must also have already resolved who was driving — the mandate needs an active driver assignment, or an explicit driver-unknown record. If neither exists, forwarding is blocked with a 409 conflict and the message "Assign a driver or mark driver as unknown before forwarding to the authority" (error code FORWARDING_REQUIRES_DRIVER_ASSIGNMENT).

Forward the communication

1. Confirm the driver is assigned or marked unknown on the mandate.
2. Choose the forward-to-authority action.
3. Provide the channel (how the message is sent) and the payload (the message content).
4. Supply an Idempotency-Key for the request. This is required — a request without one is rejected with IDEMPOTENCY_KEY_REQUIRED.
5. Submit. On success the system records the communication and returns an outcome of forwarded, a content hash, and a replayed flag.

Each forwarded message is stored as an outbound authority communication with its channel, the time it was sent, the idempotency key, and a SHA-256 content hash of the channel and payload. The hash lets you confirm exactly what was sent.

How idempotency protects you

Forwarding to an authority must never be duplicated by an accidental retry. The system guards against this in two ways:

• Same key replay — if you resend with the same Idempotency-Key, you receive the original result back with replayed set to true, instead of a second message being created. This applies within the key's retention window (24 hours).
• Persisted lookup — even independently of the cache, a communication already stored for that mandate and idempotency key is returned as a replay rather than duplicated.

Note: Blocking and not-found responses are also remembered for the same key, so a retry after a missing-driver block or an unknown mandate returns the same answer consistently. To send a genuinely new message, use a new Idempotency-Key.

Tip: Generate a fresh, unique Idempotency-Key for each distinct message you intend to send, and reuse the exact same key only when you are deliberately retrying the identical request after a network error.

Confirming a forward went through

A successful forward appears on the mandate timeline as an authority communication that moved from authority-pending to forwarded, including the channel and content hash. If the replayed flag is true, the message was already sent earlier and was not sent again.

Related

• Assign a driver to a penalty notice
• The mandate timeline
• Calculating and tracking deadlines (Fristen)