Macy’s has announced a delay in its Q3 2024 financial results due to an accounting issue involving an employee who allegedly concealed up to $154m in delivery expenses.

The retailer has released preliminary sales figures, which indicated a 2.4% decrease in net sales to $4.74bn.

The company disclosed that a single employee “intentionally” made incorrect accounting entries to hide delivery expenses estimated at between $132m and $154m from Q4 2021 through Q3 2024.

During this period, Macy’s recorded approximately $4.36bn in delivery expenses.

Macy’s stated that the employee in question is no longer associated with the company.

Originally due to report results on 26 November, Macy’s now expects to publish its full Q3 financial results by 11 December 2024.

An independent investigation found no evidence of other employees being involved and no indication that the issue impacted cash management or vendor payments, the company said.

Commenting on the errors at Macy’s, Stefan van Duyvendijk of US-based accounting software company FloQast said: “ERPs [enterprise resource planning] and most reporting software is not designed to catch erroneous accounting let alone intentionally fraudulent accounting.

“While they do have some key controls in-place, they are limited, which is why account teams focus so much time to the month-end close process to identify and correct those mistakes. This could have been avoided with the correct review and controls in place. Both being traditionally hard to achieve.

“However, by marrying workflow automation with compliance software it would have been hard to miss this mistake. Workflow automation would have made it much easier to have the appropriate review procedures setup and take place with easy insights at the reviewers’ hands.”