Sidney Kaplan

State
Sidney Kaplan
Acting Chief Financial Officer

Once the subject of numerous reports decrying it as a management backwater, the State Department has in the past five years become one of the top-rated agencies for its internal operations. Since former Secretary of State Colin Powell promoted better management during his tenure from 2001 to 2005, Foggy Bottom has been scoring high marks from the Office of Management and Budget for its financial management and other administrative practices.

A key player has been Sidney Kaplan, the highest ranking financial management officer in the Foreign Service. He was the first head of the department's new Office of Strategic Performance and Planning, where he installed a process that ties together budgets, goals and management practices to a degree unseen before in the foreign policy realm. George Mason University's Mercatus Center, an independent evaluator of agencies' strategic planning, called Kaplan's work "a remarkable improvement story."

In addition to spearheading planning, Kaplan also has helped guide a consolidation of State's financial shop, which oversees transactions in 150 currencies around the globe. He helped consolidate financial programs into two service centers in Bangkok, Thailand, and Charleston, S.C., which closed a regional service center in Paris, saving money and creating jobs in the United States.

Kaplan joined the Foreign Service in 1986, serving in Washington, the Philippines, Mauritania, Turkey and the United Kingdom. From 1995 to 2000, he was managing director of the international financial services directorate. He took over the new strategic planning office in June 2002 and became acting chief financial officer in June 2005, when CFO Christopher Burnham left the State Department to become undersecretary general for management at the United Nations.

Kaplan has a bachelor's degree from the University of Hartford and a master's from Michigan State University.