Palantir says it didn’t racially discriminate against Asian people

Palantir Technologies has come out and said that it did not discriminate against Asian people, Fortune reports. This comes after the U.S. Department of Labor sued the company for alleged racial discrimination against Asian people in its hiring and selection process.

According to the DOL’s suit, Palantir allegedly used a hiring process that discriminated against Asian applicants for software engineering roles, “routinely eliminated” qualified Asian applicants in the resume screening and telephone interview phases and hired a majority of people from its discriminatory employee referral system.

In a 15-page filing, Palantir fired back at the DOL, saying that the allegations “were entirely unfounded and based solely on a flawed statistical analysis.” Palantir also said that the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs made a mistake in evaluating the quality of applicants.

To strengthen its point, Palantir said that it has hired and retained Asian employees at “rates that exceed their presence in the relevant labor market.” The company noted that it has a workforce that is 25 percent Asian, with Asian people making up 37 percent of its product engineering team, according to Palantir’s filing.

Because Palantir is a federal contractor, the company has a legal requirement to ensure that its hiring practices are free of discrimination. The federal government has contracted services from Palantir since January 2010.

Those contracts are worth $340 million, according to the lawsuit. If the lawsuit moves forward, and Palantir does not comply with the requests from the DOL, it would lose its contracts with the FBI, the U.S. Special Operations Command and the Army.

Palantir has raised more than $2.3 billion from investors and was valued at $20 billion during its last institutional round. The case is currently pending.