Section 1305 of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) (the Act) provides that ‘books’ kept by a company under a requirement of the Act are prima facie evidence of the matters they record.
A recent decision by the Supreme Court of Western Australia determined that financial information maintained by companies, in electronic form, may be admitted into evidence as ‘books’ of those companies.
As such, unless it can be established that the software used to access or generate the data is unreliable, that information may be relied on as evidence of the financial and business activities of a company, without the need to put on evidence from a person with knowledge about how those records came into existence.