THOM BARRETT
Thirty years testing whether institutions do what they claim.
Then he turned that same methodology on a client he'd never audited: the United States Congress.
THE CAREER
The Auditor
Thom Barrett joined Coopers & Lybrand in 1978, in a group newly formed around a discipline that was still being invented: EDP auditing — testing the controls inside the computer systems that were starting to run the financial world. Over three decades at Coopers & Lybrand and then PricewaterhouseCoopers, he became the subject matter expert on operational controls across transfer agency, fund administration, trading operations, and compliance. He introduced the concept of XBRL — structured, machine-readable financial disclosure — to the SEC, and led PwC's U.S. business responsibilities for its rollout. He retired from the partnership in 2012.
The work was always the same question, asked of a different institution each time: does this system do what it claims to do, and can that claim survive someone checking it?
ORIGIN
The Client He'd Never Audited
The idea for The Quiet Collapse didn't start with a hearing room or a hard drive. It started with a green card and a set of flash cards, studying for a citizenship exam decades after arriving in America. Somewhere in that fire room, radio on, detention stories on the news, he found himself asking a plainer question than any audit had ever required: what does a good government actually look like — and had the one he'd watched grow up quietly stopped being that.
He answered it the only way thirty years of training had taught him to answer anything: by opening the books. The Constitution became the mission statement. The Preamble became the stated purpose. Congress became the client. Five years, ten chapters, and roughly eighty white papers later, that audit is The Quiet Collapse.
LIVING LIFE PRESS
The Work
Living Life Press is the imprint under which all of this is published. Four things currently sit inside the imprint:
The Quiet Collapse
The book and its supporting research: five years of white papers documenting how American governance shifted from serving citizens to serving capital.
AACIF
The AI Assertion and Chain Integrity Framework — holding consequential AI systems to the same evidentiary standard the book applies to Congress, built with a working group of former PwC colleagues and outside domain experts.
Operation Citizen
A live platform that scores Congress against the book's research in real time, built for citizens rather than for other auditors.
This Old Auditor
A weekly column applying the same methodology to AI and private capital as they're deployed right now, industry by industry.
BEYOND THE AUDIT
Earlier Work
Before Congress became the subject, the same discipline turned toward more personal terrain. Thom's earlier books trace a personal health journey alongside expedition travel to some of the most remote places on earth: both poles, Patagonia, the Arctic, the Mediterranean, and the Cape Cod coast he calls home.
Living While Dying
The Edge of Now
Embracing the Cold
Chasing My Northern Lights
The Strength of Surrender
He is also a woodworker and a pianist, and lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.