RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Former IBM employees have told a news publication that the federal government has launched a “nationwide probe” of the tech giant for alleged age discrimination in making layoffs.

ProPublica, which recently published an in-depth report on IBM’s layoff practices in recent years, said ex-IBMers from across the country had told it that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had begun the investigation.

EEOC officials declined comment.

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The ProPublica investigation demonstrated that IBM “has flouted or outflanked laws intended to protect older workers from discrimination,” the news site said.

“More than five years after IBM stopped providing legally required disclosures to older workers being laid off, the EEOC’s New York district office has begun consolidating individuals’ complaints from across the country and asking the company to explain practices recounted in the ProPublica story,” ProPublica reported early Thursday.

The ex-IBMers have “spoken with investigators and people familiar with the agency’s actions,” ProPublica said.

“[A] dozen ex-IBM employees from California, Colorado, Texas, New Jersey and elsewhere allowed ProPublica to view the status screens for their cases on the agency’s website,” it reported.

“The screens show the cases being transferred to EEOC’s New York district office shortly after the March 22 publication of ProPublica’s original story, and then being shifted to the office’s investigations division, in most instances, between April 5 and April 10.”

In March, ProPublica reported that IBM had “ousted an estimated 20,000 U.S. employees ages 40 and over since 2014, about 60 percent of its American job cuts during those years. In some instances, it earmarked money saved by the departures to hire young replacements in order to, in the words of one internal company document, ‘correct seniority mix.'”

IBM so far has declined comment.

Earlier in response to the initial ProPublic reports, IBM issued a statement saying: “We are proud of our company and its employees’ ability to reinvent themselves era after era while always complying with the law.”

IBM operates one of its largest corporate campuses in RTP and employs several thousand people across North Carolina.