Samuel Tinsing Mok

Labor
Samuel Tinsing Mok
Chief Financial Officer

Ask Samuel Tinsing Mok about his unusually long and varied career history-which includes stints in the Army, the Foreign Service, two national media companies, three international trade consulting firms (one of which he founded) and two federal agencies-and he jokes that he can't hold a job.

"There are three kinds of executives: maintenance, turnaround and entrepreneurs," Mok says. He describes himself as a change agent and entrepreneur who gets bored when he runs out of challenges. "I'm a horrible maintenance person," he says.

In 1986, Mok declined a State Department post in China when he learned he couldn't bring his then-teenage children. With no job lined up, he responded to a newspaper employment ad for comptroller of the Treasury Department. He got the job. The next year, he became the department's first career CFO, serving until 1992, when he became chief executive of a consulting firm.

As Labor CFO since January 2002, Mok's goal has been to shift from meeting basic accounting requirements to providing tools that will inform decisions. His team is replacing Labor's 15-year-old financial system with a new Web-based program that will be more flexible and have better internal controls. He says it will free his staff to do more high-level financial analysis. It is scheduled for completion in 2007.

The role of CFO at Labor is different from the job at Treasury, Mok says. At Treasury, each bureau has its own financial office, and his job was "policy and traffic cop." At Labor, he runs the centralized financial system. "Here it's an operational job, and I actually deliver services and get people paid and make sure the reports go to production," Mok says. He praises Labor Secretary Elaine Chao for the emphasis she puts on financial management. "It makes my job a lot easier," he says.