If Centrelink is found to have breached its duty of care, those people wrongly issued debt notices have grounds to sue the social service, Australian Lawyers Alliance spokesperson Greg Barns told Guardian Australia.
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“The way they did it, obviously it’s dangerous, because their algorithms are flawed in the first place," he said.
“Secondly, you have to be careful with data. Much of the data that’s in the federal government, how good is it really? There is this sort of a blind faith in data.”
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It may then have to compensate those who have been affected.
“It seems to me that there’s been such a systemic failure in the way this has been put together...that there is potentially an argument that [Centrelink] has breached its duty of care to its clients,” Barns told Guardian Australia.
“If a person suffers a financial loss as a result of that, they may have a cause of action.”