The United States Labor Department is looking into a pledge made earlier this year by Microsoft to increase the hiring of Black employees as being unlawful discrimination based on race and a violation of the Civil Rights Act. The contact is tied to Microsoft’s growing role as a federal contractor, which includes it potentially securing a U.S. Department of Defense contract.

Dev Stahlkopf, corporate VP and general counsel at Microsoft, explained in a blog post that the company was contacted last week by the U.S. Department of Labor Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) on the commitment. He explained that Microsoft is subject to “several OFCCP requirements,” with the contact in reference to an initiative Microsoft announced in June.

The announcement was as part of a blog post of an email from CEO Satya Nadella that in the wake of protests earlier this year tied to police killings of Black people included commitments to increase diversity within the computing giant. This included the doubling of the number of “Black and African American people managers, senior individual contributors, and senior leaders in the United States by 2025.” Microsoft also pledged to invest $150 million over that time frame into its own diversity and inclusion programs.

Stahlkopf wrote that the letter from the OFCCP “suggested that this initiative ‘appears to imply that employment action may be taken on the basis of race.’ The letter asked us to prove that the actions we are taking to improve opportunities are not illegal race-based decisions.”

“Emphatically, they are not,” Stahlkopf wrote. He explained that Microsoft was aware of the law prohibiting hiring practices based on race, but that “we also have affirmative obligations as a company that serves the federal government to continue to increase the diversity of our workforce, and we take those obligations very seriously.”

“We have decades of experience and know full well how to appropriately create opportunities for people without taking away opportunities from others,” Stahlkopf noted. “Furthermore, we know that we need to focus on creating more opportunity, including through specific programs designed to cast a wide net for talent for whom we can provide careers with Microsoft.”

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which was passed in 1964, protects employees and job applicants from being discriminated against based on “race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.” The Civil Rights Act more broadly was targeted at erasing discrimination against Black people.

A number of technology firms have also implemented programs to increase the diversity of their workforce. Cisco, for one, has pledged to have at least 25% of its workforce made up of Black employees by 2023. The company is currently facing a lawsuit that it discriminated against an employee due to their Indian heritage.

Microsoft is currently locked in a legal battle against rival Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the awarding of the DoD’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract. That contract is a $10 billion deal to modernize the DoD’s operations using cloud technology.

AWS had been favored to win the contract, but was eventually denied the deal following an investigation into the bidding process at the behest of President Donald Trump. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Trump have had a long-running public feud.

The JEDI deal did not sit well with some Microsoft employees who posted a letter protesting the move. The company did offer alternative employment options to employees that opposed the bid.