Dive Brief:
- Oracle lawyers were in court Tuesday to deny accusations by a former employee who claims the company ordered her to falsify accounting numbers for the company’s cloud business.
- In a reply to the former employee’s filing in June in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Oracle also denied that it dismissed the employee in retaliation.
- Oracle said the former employee was terminated for "legitimate, non-discriminatory, job-related reasons."
Dive Insight:
Svetlana Blackburn, a senior finance manager for North America SaaS/Cloud Revenue, claims she was asked to add "millions of dollars of accruals" for projected business to Oracle’s cloud computing data sheet without any evidence that the numbers were legitimate. Blackburn claims she was terminated last October in retaliation when she refused to do so.
Blackburn said she received a positive performance review just two months before the incident. But Oracle alleges that Blackburn was fired for poor performance.
Blackburn is accusing Oracle of unlawful retaliation under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, which offer protection to whistleblowers. But Oracle said Blackburn never told her supervisor that she would "blow the whistle," as she claims.
An Oracle spokeswoman maintains that the company’s cloud accounting is "proper and correct."
