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Record W4416331634 · doi:10.56734/ijbms.v6n11a1

The Macy’s Accounting Fraud Case

2025· article· W4416331634 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Margaret O’Reilly‐Allen, Maria H. Sanchez

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Journal of Business & Management Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicAccounting Education and Careers
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAuditFinancial statementAccrualTransparency (behavior)Accounting recordsEarningsQuarter (Canadian coin)Financial accountingAccounting information system

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This case describes a real-world fraud involving the retail department store Macy’s, a publicly traded company on the NYSE. In late 2024, Macy’s announced that they had discovered an accounting “error” in their financial statements. The discovery of the error forced Macy’s to delay their third quarter earnings release. Macy’s disclosed that a single employee had been falsifying accounting records for approximately three years, leading to financial statement restatements to correct delivery expenses, accruals and related tax effects. The error and restatements led to questions about internal controls at Macy’s. It also leads to questions as to whether this was correctly called an error, or if Macy’s should have described it as a fraud. This case examines the misstatement and its consequences, and can be used in an accounting or auditing classroom to help students understand errors and fraud, internal controls, ethical leadership, and regulatory requirements for publicly traded companies. Students will learn the importance of accuracy, transparency and ethics in record keeping and financial reporting. As we prepare students for the working world, these lessons in ethics will be more important than ever. This case is appropriate for an upper level undergraduate course or a masters level accounting or auditing course.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies, Scholarly communication
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.761
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0030.002
Open science0.0020.002
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.020
GPT teacher head0.313
Teacher spread0.292 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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