Macy’s Inc. is clawing back more than $600,000 in cash bonuses from executives after an accounting scandal led to inflated pay.
The department-store operator tied executives’ cash bonuses to an earnings metric that turned out to be overstated by around $81 million in 2023, Macy’s said in a securities filing on Tuesday evening.
That meant Macy’s overpaid executives by $609,613 as of the end of 2024, the company said. Some of that has already been clawed back, so the outstanding amount stood at $352,093 as of April 1, it added.
The company’s compensation committee said it “will seek to recover the remaining amount of the erroneously awarded compensation” from executives. Macy’s didn’t name the people whose bonuses will be affected. A spokesperson declined to comment.
Macy’s also said Tuesday its chief financial officer was leaving. The company said it was replacing him with his counterpart at Capri Holdings Ltd., Thomas J. Edwards, and said the move was part of its plan to return to long-term, profitable growth.
Under U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules, public companies are required to assess whether they need to revoke corporate bonuses if they uncover accounting errors that miscalculated past profits.
In November, Macy’s delayed an earnings release and then issued a lower profit outlook after an investigation found an employee intentionally hid more than $150 million in delivery expenses from the fourth quarter of 2021 through the third quarter of 2024. The probe didn’t uncover evidence of missing cash or unpaid vendors and instead pointed to accounting errors by the former employee, who also falsified documents to hide the problem, according to the company.