Accusations follow Oracle's major defeat in API copyright suit against Google.
A former senior finance manager for Oracle claims the software maker fired her for not inflating revenues in its cloud services division. In a whistleblower and wrongful termination lawsuit, Svetlana Blackburn also claims that Oracle ultimately inflated the numbers without her assistance.

"The data, she knew, would end up in SEC filings and be touted on earnings calls, used to paint a rosier picture than actually existed on the ground," Blackburn says in her nine-page lawsuit. (PDF)

The Silicon Valley software maker, having a market cap of roughly $165 billion, said it fired the woman for inadequate work.

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

The federal lawsuit comes as Oracle just suffered a major defeat in its long-running $9 billion lawsuit against Google. A San Francisco federal jury declared that the search giant's use of Oracle's APIs in the Android operating system was authorized by the fair-use doctrine. What's more, the new suit questions a key metric—cloud services revenue—that has become an increasingly important sign to investors of a software company's health. Oracle's stock has slid about 10 percent this year, in part because of the stock market's concerns about its financial performance as the company moves from selling software for use on customer computers to software being hosted and run on Oracle's data centers.

Blackburn's lawsuit claims Oracle was pushing her "to fit square data into round holes, in an effort to bolster Oracle Cloud Services financial reports that would be paraded before company leadership as well as the investing public."

Citigroup analyst Walter Pritchard, in a Thursday research note, said the litigation "will keep some level of uncertainty" hovering over Oracle's stock valuation until more information comes out in the lawsuit.