Tom Hood is leaving his position as the long-time executive director of the Maryland Association of CPAs to join the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants as executive vice president of business growth and engagement.
The association has also acquired MACPA’s Business Learning Institute, which provides forward-looking skills training and programs primarily to corporate accountants, to boost its learning offerings for corporate employees.
While Hood’s new role will include running the BLI, his primary responsibilities will be as a sort of global scout for the profession — getting out into the field around the world to both identify challenges and opportunities that accountants need help with, and to find, create and leverage new tools and services to help accountants meet those challenges and opportunities.
“Empowering human capital to thrive in a global world … and helping us equip CPAs, CGMAs and others with that future-ready skill set — that’s probably the part that really excited me,” Hood told Accounting Today. “It’s a step up on scaling up what we’ve been doing already, which is equipping the profession to deal with the future.”
A team of people will be coming over with the BLI from MACPA; they will report into the association’s sales group, while Hood will report directly to association CEO and president Barry Melancon.
“Tom’s vision and mission to help finance and accounting professionals grow in a changing business environment is well aligned with the association’s goals of powering trust, opportunity and prosperity for members, students, the profession and those they serve,” said Melancon, who is also president and CEO of the American Institute of CPAs, in a statement. “He brings energy, insight, enthusiasm and a unique ability to facilitate connections.”
Hood expects to work closely with the association’s chief executive of management accounting, Andrew Harding, and its newly appointed CEO of public accounting, Sue Coffey (
The role will involve working across a great many segments — both professional and geographic — of the profession. “The goal will be to try to take the things that are rising to the top of issues and opportunities in all these segments and then beginning to address them,” he explained. “We’re finding that the issues people are facing globally are the same they’re facing the U.S. — how can we leverage and learn from each other in a bigger community? We’re going to leverage some of the grassroots communities that already exist. On the corporate side, there’s more of that in the U.K. and the CIMA side, and we want to bring some of that into the U.S., and then obviously we want to build on and leverage the things that are already going on in public accounting in the U.S. on the institute side.”
“My goal there will be to bring the intelligence from the ground, being involved at a deep level, surveying and getting results, and bringing that intelligence back into the association so they can drive products and services to address the trends and issues in those constituencies,” he continued.
Succession at MACPA
In addition to being one of the profession’s primary thought leaders — he has been voted the second most influential person in accounting by his peers every year for almost a decade — Hood is also widely recognized for having driven the development of MACPA into both a model of an innovative state CPA society, and a source of national leadership for the profession, including recent AICPA chair Kimberly Ellison-Taylor and future chair Anoop Mehta.
As Hood leaves for his new position, current MACPA chief operating officer Jackie Brown will step up as CEO.
MACPA had been working on its succession for three or four years, Hood explained.
“I’m leaving a little earlier than planned, but our leadership team has been forged in the fires of COVID 19,” he said. “It’s not just Jackie — it’s Jackie and Bill Sheridan and Mary Beth Halpern and Dee Sullivan and many others — but Jackie is the one who really kept the culture together throughout the pandemic and kept that leadership team functioning while I was out on the road. … I think we’re all looking forward to what MACPA 3.0 is going to look like under Jackie’s leadership. We’re feeling good about it.”
Besides leaving behind a strong leadership team, Hood noted that MACPA has come through the pandemic well from a financial point of view, and that the sale of the BLI leaves the state society in an even better fiscal position.
“We invested a lot of time and money and sweat over the years into BLI, and the acquisition helps put that investment back into Maryland,” he said. “So there’s a nice healthy fund balance going forward in what’s really a very uncertain future. It’s nice to have that restoration or payback. … I’m leaving it in good financial shape and in really good leadership shape.”
Hood also noted that he’ll still be working from Maryland, and that he’ll stay active as a volunteer over the next year on MACPA’s legislative committee, which plays a leading role in advocating for issues of importance to CPAs with the state legislature.
While he’ll maintain his ties with Maryland, Hood is clearly excited about the possibilities of his new position.
“It’s the only job I would have taken at this stage in my career,” he said. “Being part of the profession and helping to continue transforming it — that’s where my passion is. I’m excited about continuing to help this profession thrive in a global world. This pandemic is giving us a whole other opportunity. … The world and our communities need us more than ever in this environment, and my goal is to keep that moving and make us even more indispensable.”
