A 26-year Vanguard [profile] veteran is accusing the low-cost mutual fund titan of racial and age-based discrimination and retaliation.

Last week Thom Parson, who is African-American and 52 years old, sued the Malvern, Pennsylvania-based mutually-owned mutual fund company in federal court for "pretextually and unlawfully" firing him in May 2014. The suit follows Parson sending his discrimination charges to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission last October.

Spokespeople for Vanguard and for Parson's attorney, Wayne Ely of Kolman Ely PC, declined to comment for this story.

In Parson's 17-page complaint, he claims to have discovered an error in Vanguard's Horizon system for calculating employee productivity. More specifically, Parson claims that for about four months his hours logged in Horizon were doubled, from 7.5 hours a day to 15 hours a day; and doubling his hours in Horizon translates into dividing his productivity in half.

Parson claims that his supervisor or someone else at Vanguard "was deliberately entering bogus information" into Horizon. Yet in his complaint Parson claims that he "was fired shortly after disclosing his findings."

The complaint was filed in Philadelphia, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The case, Parson v. the Vanguard Group, has been assigned to Chief Judge Petrese Tucker. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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