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- Some Macy’s executives have to pay back bonuses as a result of an accounting scandal.
- Macy’s overstated one of its earnings metrics in 2023, leading to the inflated bonuses.
- The executives owe Macy’s over $600,000 as a result, the retailer said.
Macy’s executives will have to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonus payments as a result of an accounting scandal, the department store firm said on Tuesday.
The retailer overstated one of its earnings measures by $81 million in 2023, the company said in a filing with the SEC. That metric influenced how much Macy’s executives were paid in bonuses the following year.
As a result, some execs will have to pay back a cumulative $609,613 in cash bonuses that the company awarded them through the end of 2024, according to the filing.
The company has already reclaimed some of the bonus payments and had to collect the remaining $352,093 as of April 1, the filing said. Macy’s “will seek to recover the remaining amount of the erroneously awarded compensation” from the executives during the company’s 2025 fiscal year, the company said in the SEC filing.
A Macy’s spokesperson declined to comment in response to questions from Business Insider, including which executives had to pay back bonuses.
Last fall, Macy’s delayed its third-quarter earnings report after it said that an employee hid more than $150 million in expenses. The company said at the time that one employee who oversaw expenses for small package delivery was responsible for the incorrect figures.
Accounting experts told BI then that the problem likely wasn’t just bad accounting but the failure of multiple internal controls at Macy’s.
In December, Macy’s corrected some of its past financial figures, according to a filing. The department store chain said that its net income for 2023 was 57% lower than it initially reported, for example.
