An Oracle employee who claimed the company was falsifying accounts to make its cloud business look better has been sacked and now faces legal action against her lodged by the company.
Svetlana Blackburn said upper management were trying to force her to change the numbers to make its performance specifically related to Oracle's cloud services operation look better than it was.
She said she was expected to add millions of dollars of extra revenues for their expected business "with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers," while she claimed other executives decided to take matters into their own hands, adding falsified accruals to the accounts.
Following the claims, Blackburn was sacked by Oracle, despite her receiving a positive performance review just two months before. However, Oracle has claimed she was generating incorrect reports herself to impress her superiors, rather than doing it in response to pressure from the management.
Now Blackburn is trying to sue Oracle for unfair dismissal, while also saying the company violated the anti-retaliation provisions of the federal Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance and Dodd-Frank financial reform laws. She's demanding the company pays her punitive damages, double back pay, and other remunerations.
However, Oracle is telling a different side of the story and intend to sue her in response.
"We are confident that all our cloud accounting is proper and correct," Deborah Hellinger, Head of Global Corporate Communications at Oracle told IT Pro.
"This former employee worked at Oracle for less than a year and did not work in the accounting group. She was terminated for poor performance and we intend to sue her for malicious prosecution."
