Forvis Mazars Adds Three to Governing Board

In most industries, adding three people to a governing board might sound like a polite corporate memo that lands with all the drama of a stapler refill. In public accounting, though, board appointments can say a lot about where a firm is headed, what kinds of expertise it wants at the table, and how seriously it takes the next phase of growth. That is why the news that Forvis Mazars added Keith Giddens, Tammy Rivera, and Caleb Vuljanic to its U.S. Governing Board deserves more than a quick nod and a yawn.

The move is not just a leadership update. It is a strategy signal. Forvis Mazars is still shaping its identity as a larger, more globally connected firm after the launch of the Forvis Mazars network and the integration of Mazars USA into the U.S. business. Against that backdrop, board composition matters. Who gets a seat tells you what the firm values now, what it expects next, and what kinds of client and operational challenges it wants represented in the room.

The News in Plain English

Forvis Mazars announced that Keith Giddens, Tammy Rivera, and Caleb Vuljanic joined the U.S. Governing Board effective November 1. All three were elected by fellow partners to serve three-year terms. That matters because the board is not a decorative leadership shelf. It is the group that helps set the strategic direction of the firm. In other words, this is where big calls get shaped: growth priorities, leadership development, investment choices, and the kind of business the firm wants to win over the next several years.

The timing is notable. This appointment follows an earlier board refresh in late 2024, when Forvis Mazars named Sarah Saunders, Brian West, and Gary Schafer to board terms and added Karine Philippon and JoAnna Simek as advisory board members. Then, in September 2025, the Governing Board reappointed Tom Watson as CEO for another four-year term beginning June 1, 2026. Put those moves together and a pattern emerges: the firm is not improvising leadership as it grows. It is actively building a bench.

Why These Three Picks Matter

What makes these appointments interesting is not just that three people were added. It is who they are and what they bring. Forvis Mazars did not choose three lookalike leaders cut from the same navy-blue blazer. It chose executives with different market exposures, different technical backgrounds, and different operating lenses. That is usually a sign of a firm trying to make its board smarter, not simply larger.

Keith Giddens Brings Tax Depth and Growth Experience

Keith Giddens serves as managing partner for Tax Specialty Services. Before that, he led the Charlotte office and held leadership roles in Washington, D.C., and Greenville, South Carolina. That background matters because tax leadership inside a large accounting firm is not just about knowing the code well enough to scare junior staff before lunch. It is about understanding how regulation, multistate complexity, international operations, and specialty planning affect real clients with real expansion plans.

Giddens also appears to represent something boards usually value highly: a leader with measurable operational growth experience. The company pointed to his track record in revenue and headcount growth, which suggests he is not simply a technical specialist. He is an operator. For a firm of Forvis Mazars’ scale, that kind of perspective is useful when strategy discussions move from lofty nouns like innovation and stewardship to harder questions like where to invest, which markets to strengthen, and how to scale specialized service lines without making everyone miserable.

Tammy Rivera Adds Healthcare and Multi-Market Leadership

Tammy Rivera is the managing partner of the Colorado-Salt Lake practice unit, overseeing more than 200 team members across Denver, Colorado Springs, and Salt Lake City. She brings more than 20 years of experience providing assurance and consulting services to healthcare organizations, including governmental and nonprofit hospitals, mental health centers, private equity-backed companies, foundations, and case management organizations.

That is a valuable portfolio of experience at a time when healthcare finance, nonprofit sustainability, and private equity-backed growth are all forcing accounting firms to be more sector-savvy. Rivera’s background gives the board insight into one of the most regulation-heavy, margin-sensitive, and operationally complex corners of the economy. Healthcare clients do not want hand-waving. They want advisors who understand reimbursement pressure, reporting complexity, governance expectations, and deal activity. Rivera’s experience helps strengthen that viewpoint at board level.

Just as important, she runs a regional practice unit spread across multiple markets. That gives her a practical lens on staffing, culture, client delivery, and local leadership execution. Boards need that kind of market reality check. Strategy always sounds elegant in PowerPoint. It gets a lot less elegant when you have to recruit talent, retain clients, and keep quality high across different offices and service lines.

Caleb Vuljanic Strengthens Assurance and Technical Judgment

Caleb Vuljanic serves as Metro D.C. managing partner and provides assurance services to clients in technology, private equity, and professional services. He also previously served in the firm’s professional standards group, where he worked on complex accounting and auditing matters. That combination is especially useful.

Boards benefit from people who understand both market-facing growth and technical rigor. Vuljanic appears to offer both. His Metro D.C. role gives him front-line leadership experience in a strategically important market, while his background in professional standards suggests comfort with complex accounting issues, risk, quality, and technical interpretation. In a profession where growth can never come at the expense of audit quality and risk discipline, that is not a side skill. It is central.

His client exposure in technology and private equity is also timely. Both sectors move quickly, demand sophisticated advice, and often bring cross-border, transactional, or reporting complexity. A board that includes someone fluent in those client realities is better positioned to make sound decisions about sector investment and service development.

A Board Move That Fits the Moment

This appointment does not exist in a vacuum. It arrives while Forvis Mazars is still working through the opportunities created by a bigger platform. The Forvis Mazars network launched in June 2024 as a two-member global structure: Forvis Mazars LLP in the United States and Forvis Mazars Group SC as the internationally integrated partnership. That structure created a single global brand, a global network board, and a model built to support worldwide client service while keeping the component organizations partner-owned.

Inside the United States, Mazars USA joined the Forvis Mazars business as part of that broader launch. The result was a larger domestic footprint and a more internationally connected proposition. In the accounting industry, that is not a small footnote. Middle-market and upper-middle-market clients increasingly expect national depth with international reach. They do not necessarily want a Big Four price tag or bureaucracy, but they do want consistency, cross-border capability, and sector expertise. Forvis Mazars has clearly been positioning itself for that sweet spot.

Numbers help explain why governance now matters so much. The firm’s integrated report put U.S. revenue above $2.24 billion for fiscal 2025, with operations across 30 states, 76 markets, more than 600 partners and principals, and more than 7,000 team members. Later reporting said combined global revenue reached $5.7 billion as of August 31, 2025, up 11% year over year. Inside Public Accounting’s ranking places Forvis Mazars among the top firms in the country, and industry coverage has consistently framed it as a top-10 player.

That kind of scale creates board-level questions that are more complicated than “Should we open an office and order more coffee mugs?” Large firms need governance that can think about talent pipelines, sector bets, quality control, operating efficiency, geographic alignment, client experience, technology investment, and leadership succession all at once. Adding three leaders with distinct specialties suggests Forvis Mazars knows that scale without governance discipline is just organized chaos in a nicer conference room.

What the Appointments Suggest About Strategy

There are at least three clear signals in these board additions.

First, Forvis Mazars is leaning into diversified expertise. Giddens represents tax specialization and growth leadership. Rivera brings healthcare, nonprofit, and regional operating leadership. Vuljanic adds assurance depth, private equity and tech client exposure, and technical accounting judgment. That is not random. It suggests the firm wants strategy informed by both client demand and execution reality.

Second, the firm appears serious about stewardship and succession. The company has repeatedly framed leadership transitions in terms of stewardship, partner ownership, and building something durable for future generations of partners and team members. That language is not unusual in professional services, but in this case it is backed by action: board refreshes in 2024 and 2025, a formal CEO reappointment process, and continued governance development at both the U.S. and global levels.

Third, the move reflects a firm still integrating and sharpening its post-launch identity. Forvis Mazars has global scale, but it also wants to preserve local accountability and partner-led culture. That balance is hard. Boards help enforce it. Adding leaders who know both technical work and market leadership increases the odds that the firm can grow without losing operational grip.

Why Clients and Team Members Should Care

Clients may never memorize the governing board roster, and honestly, they should not have to. But they do feel the downstream effects of board decisions. Governance affects where the firm invests, which industries it prioritizes, how it manages quality, what technology it rolls out, how it develops talent, and how quickly it can bring the right expertise to complex engagements.

For team members, these appointments matter because they say something about what leadership looks like at the top. None of the three new board members represents a purely ceremonial lane. Each comes from serious client work and market responsibility. That sends a useful message inside a firm: operational leadership, technical strength, and sector relevance still count. In a profession that sometimes loves jargon almost as much as it loves acronyms, that is refreshingly concrete.

It also helps that the board itself is broad. The current U.S. board includes leaders across tax, consulting, private client, innovation, regional management, and other practice areas. Adding Giddens, Rivera, and Vuljanic deepens that mix rather than tilting it too far in one direction. A good board does not chase one trend. It builds enough range to see around corners.

Conclusion

Forvis Mazars adding three leaders to its Governing Board may look, at first glance, like routine leadership housekeeping. It is not. It is a meaningful move by a firm that is growing, integrating, and clarifying how it wants to govern at scale. Keith Giddens, Tammy Rivera, and Caleb Vuljanic bring different strengths, but together they reflect the kind of leadership blend Forvis Mazars seems to want more of: technical credibility, market leadership, growth experience, and sector depth.

That matters because firms do not compete on size alone. They compete on judgment. They compete on execution. They compete on whether the right voices are in the room before decisions are made, not after problems show up wearing expensive shoes. In that sense, these appointments say something encouraging about Forvis Mazars. The firm is still expanding, but it also appears to be paying close attention to the less flashy machinery that actually keeps a large professional-services business working: governance, stewardship, and leadership depth.

Experience Section: What Board Changes Like This Usually Feel Like Inside a Growing Firm

Anyone who has watched a fast-growing accounting firm move through a governance change knows the experience is rarely dramatic on the surface. There are no ticker-tape parades. No one walks through the audit department with a fog machine. Most people see a news release, nod once, and go back to whichever spreadsheet is currently ruining their afternoon. But under the surface, leadership moves like this tend to carry real weight.

Inside a firm, a board appointment often feels like a signal flare. Partners and directors read it as a clue about where influence is moving. Team members read it as a clue about what kinds of careers get noticed. Clients may not study every detail, but market leaders do. They want to know whether the board is being shaped by operators, rainmakers, technical experts, culture builders, or some mix of all four.

That is why appointments like these often create a quiet kind of confidence when they make sense. A tax leader with proven growth experience? That tells people the firm cares about specialized capability and business building. A healthcare-focused managing partner who leads across multiple markets? That suggests the board wants practical operating insight, not just theory dressed up in polished language. A Metro D.C. assurance leader with professional standards experience? That says growth still needs to sit next to quality and technical discipline. Those are reassuring messages in a large firm.

There is also a human side to these changes that outsiders do not always see. In partner-led firms, governance is tied closely to trust. Board members are expected to think beyond their home office, their own book of business, or their favorite niche. They are supposed to act as stewards for the whole enterprise. That changes the experience of leadership. The job becomes less about winning your local argument and more about balancing the needs of different markets, service lines, industries, and future leaders who are not yet in the room.

For employees, these moments can be surprisingly motivating. When the new board includes people who have built teams, solved technical problems, and led real markets, it makes the path upward feel more believable. It tells rising managers and principals that serious work still matters. Not just charisma. Not just title inflation. Actual leadership. Actual client service. Actual judgment. In professional services, that message travels farther than firms sometimes realize.

And for clients, even when they never read the announcement, they eventually feel the consequences. Board-level choices shape investment in technology, staffing models, sector strategy, industry training, and service consistency. In other words, the boardroom eventually shows up in the client experience. Maybe not tomorrow morning, but definitely before long.

So yes, a story about three new governing board members may not sound thrilling enough to knock superhero movies off the weekend box office. But in a large accounting firm, it is one of the clearest ways to see what leadership really values. And in the case of Forvis Mazars, the experience this move creates is one of deliberate growth: bigger, yes, but also more structured, more balanced, and more serious about who helps steer the ship.