To ensure protection in the global North, asylum-seekers must surmount limitative government policies and propose a cogent refugee narrative. Their credibility becomes their chief asset and must survive the multiple challenges resulting from intercultural communication and interactions including multiple institutional actors. Trying to examine the influence institutional grasps of refugee narrative creation have on credibility evaluation, this paper proposes the findings of an assay of a corpus of documents from the Australian tribunal responsible for the administrative review of asylum decisions. The paper critically examines these texts to distinguish how the tribunal and its agents discursively propose the various actors involved in asylum appeals. It is claimed that despite the warnings of extant scholarship, these texts propose the asylum-seeker as the only author of the final refugee narrative, regardless of the role that decision-makers and other actors, like lawyers and interpreters, play in its co-construction. Thus, the institution places disproportionate liability on the asylum-seeker for communication results, generating important challenges for their credibility.