Tom Brandt is a risk management practitioner in the U.S. federal government. With nearly three decades of federal service, he is currently the Chief Risk Officer (CRO) and Director of Planning and Risk for the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (FRTIB). Previously, Tom was the CRO for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) where he led the agency’s enterprise risk and audit management programs, enabling the identification, prioritization, evaluation, and treatment of key risks to achieving the IRS mission as well as coordinating the agency’s handling of oversight audits. In November 2021, the IRS’s Enterprise Risk Management Program was awarded by RIMS (The Risk Management Society) their 2021 Global ERM Award of Distinction. In November 2024, the FRTIB was also recognized with the same award.
In 2016, Tom served as Head of the Tax Administration Unit at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, France where he led the work of the Forum on Tax Administration (FTA. After returning to the IRS in 2017, he founded and served as Chair of the OECD’s Enterprise Risk Management Community of Interest (COI) through December 2021. Tom was elected by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) for the 2021 Class of Academy Fellows for his distinguished work in the field of public administration and policy. In 2020, Tom completed a three-year term on the Board of Directors for the Association for Federal Enterprise Risk Management and was President in 2019. Tom has also provided tax administration advisory and capacity building assistance to numerous tax administrations world-wide through projects of the International Monetary Fund and OECD.
An article Tom authored in 2018 on Lessons Learned the Hard Way, Enterprise Risk Management, Public Trust and the IRS, published in the Association of Government Accountants’ (AGA) flagship Journal of Government Financial Management, received the AGA Author Award for the article that makes the most significant contribution to the literature of the profession. In 2019, he co-authored the government white-paper “Getting Ahead of Risks Before They Become Government Failures: An Imperative for Agency Leaders to Embrace Enterprise Risk Management,” and was named to the Federal 100 by Federal Computer Week in 2020. He authored Rebuilding Trust in Government Through ERM in the Fall 2022 edition of the Journal of Government Financial Management.