Oracle says it will sue a fired employee who filed a 'whistleblower' lawsuit

Larry Ellison

(Oracle)
Oracle executive chairman and CTO Larry Ellison

Oracle has had time to ponder its response to news of a lawsuit filed by a former employee, Svetlana Blackburn. And its response is: We're going to sue her back.

Blackburn alleges that she was fired because she refused to do some "improper and suspect" accounting in regard to Oracle's cloud computing business.

Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that "Plaintiff’s superiors instructed her to add millions of dollars in accruals to financial reports, with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers, an act that Plaintiff warned was improper and suspect accounting. She told her supervisor, 'I will blow the whistle' if ordered to proceed further in this fashion."

Oracle vehemently denies the allegation and spokesperson Deborah Hellinger sent Business Insider this statement this morning (emphasis ours).

"We are confident that all our cloud accounting is proper and correct. 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."

Blackburn, in her lawsuit contends that she worked as a Senior Finance Manager, North America SaaS/Cloud Revenue, for Oracle. She also contends that Oracle terminated her employment on Oct. 15 last year, two months after she received a positive performance review and a month after the alleged incident began.

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