Hudson Hollister is a man with passion and energy for everything in life that grabs his attention. His main goal is to make our federal government run smoothly and efficiently, and though his career has run into many hurdles along the way, he has had major successes--including garnering many awards for his work getting a major law passed in Congress. 

Hudson began his life in Joliet, near Chicago, Illinois, where he was home schooled. He earned a degree in political science and a law degree from Northwestern University and became a securities litigator for Latham and Watkins in 2008. After his stint at Latham, Hollister worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and then for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. As he amusingly relayed it to the group, his work trying to make government information more open and accessible has involved "three resignations, two non-profits, a stint for the executive branch, and a position working for a congressional committee." 

In his view, the biggest problem in achieving this goal has been the indifference of many government employees, an approach to life that Hudson calls "the government shrug." Turning the ship of state can be cumbersome, and he believes that many government employees adopt this strategy to cope with the difficulties of achieving significant progress. Not Hudson Hollister. He, too, found working at the SEC and on Capitol Hill a slow-moving, unsatisfying process, so he took a leap, and created the Data Coalition, a non-profit organization, to galvanize support from technology firms, federal agencies, and Congress. The group helped draft and push through legislation to make government spending data open and machine readable. The result is a law called the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA), and now anyone can go to www.usaspending.gov  to see how their tax dollars are spent. 

His current passion is to create a common data structure for organizing information about financial institutions that report to the SEC. If achieved, a common reporting format would produce greater transparency for tracking institutions, a better ability to manage financial information, and the automation of this process.

In 2008, there were 6,000 public companies. There are 600 different complicated forms required when a company goes public. Public companies allow for a broad base of investors to share in the risk and profits. The majority of companies would like to go public in the United States, but the reporting requirements are so onerous, that the number is dropping dramatically. However, the reporting complexity is a bonus for rule writers such as law firms and accountants who specialize in the intricacies of these forms. In the past, both Democrats and Republicans have tried to simplify the process for companies to go public, but the efforts have failed. 

The emergence of technology has offered the possibility of simplifying the reporting process. For example, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has consolidated their requirements into a common data structure which allowed for the emergence of companies like TurboTax, which fill out forms by automatically posing questions to the end user. This is possible because in 2001, the IRS and states agreed on a common format for data which has led to the automation of tax forms. There is an ironic downside to this: Intuit, which owns TurboTax, would like to increase the complexity of this process to limit the ability of competitors to succeed in this market. Regardless, the upside for consumers has been significant.

	Recap by Emily Hoffmann

Unfortunately, the SEC has not adopted a consistent format. The process of reviewing accounting rules is done manually, rather than  via automation. There is huge inertia against change.