Recall the Macy’s case where an employee succeeded in covering up, for a long time, more than $150 million in bookkeeping mistakes. Now Macy’s has finished its internal investigation and decided that the employee had been acting alone, making all those mistakes all by himself.

The employee told investigators about having mistakenly understated the amount of small parcel delivery expenses in late 2021, the person briefed on the probe said. Macy’s has said that the employee had responsibility for small package delivery expense accounting….
To hide the error, the employee continued to intentionally make erroneous accounting entries and falsify underlying documentation until the misstatement was discovered this fall….

Furthermore [emphasis added],

Macy’s didn’t say how it uncovered the erroneous entries or how they went undetected by the company’s auditor, KPMG.

Maybe the employee wasn’t acting entirely alone. He had the functionally ineffective assistance of too-inattentive supervisors, too-inattentive checkers of his work, and that auditor which maybe was just rubberstamping company books and collecting fees.

Macy’s management might want to expand its investigation and address those inadequacies.