Days before Macy's is set to take center stage for its annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, the department store chain this week revealed a years-long accounting debacle unlikely to inspire gratitude among shoppers and shareholders. A former employee ...

For years, Macy’s Inc. touted its ability to boost profits by cutting delivery costs and trimming other expenses on calls with Wall Street analysts. Then on Monday, the department store chain surprised investors by revealing that those very costs had become the source of an internal investigation into what the company has described as a multimillion-dollar employee plot to manipulate the metrics.

The retail giant delayed the results of its third quarter earnings after discovering that an employee hid millions of dollars in delivery expenses over the last three years.