Like any good pilot, former Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS) finance chief Kathy Gledhill likes to land the plane smoothly after a major project.

Of course, she wanted it no different when it came to planning her retirement and finding her replacement. As it happened, Gledhill found that person in the copilot’s chair: RIMS controller Bereket Haile.

RIMS announced in December that Gledhill was stepping down at the end of 2024 and that Haile would replace her. CFO Brew recently sat down with both Haile and Gledhill,as the two discussed the transition plan and how Haile prepared for the promotion.

Gledhill said she hadn’t settled on retirement at the time Haile first joined, but she did tell him “there would be a future for him” at the organization. Gledhill said a key reason she hired Haile was because, at the time, RIMS was migrating from an old, manual accounting system to cloud-based software, and Haile had experience doing that.

“I basically said to him, ‘You’re…going to own this; while I’m finishing this transition out, you need to plan the future forward,’” Gledhill said. “That’s what we did, and we really have worked together just seamlessly for the whole year.”

Click here to keep reading how these CFOs navigated succession.—AZ

The IRS is laying off around 7,000 employees, the AP reported, or around 7% of its 100,000-person workforce. The cuts are being made under directives from the Trump administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency”.

The fired employees are probationary workers who do not yet have civil service protection. Most of them work in compliance, the branch of the IRS that handles auditing and collections. More than 3,500 of them are part of the IRS’s Small Business/Self-Employed division, the Journal of Accountancy said.

Kevin Hassett, director of the White House Economic Council, implied that the firings were for cause. They were “absolutely on the table for good reasons,” he said, as the New York Times reported. “There are more than 100,000 people working to collect taxes and not all of them are fully occupied.”

Emails sent to staff being laid off said that, in effect, “your ability, skills, and performance do not make you a fit for federal employment,” Alex Jay Berman, EVP of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) Chapter 71, said, according to NBC10. But all fired staff received identical letters regardless of performance or tenure, he noted, including some who hadn’t been employed long enough to receive performance reviews. He described the letters as “willfully incorrect and, to our belief in NTEU, unlawful.”

For more on the IRS layoffs, click here.—CV

In February, President Donald Trump first imposed 25% additional tariffs on Canada and Mexico and subsequently paused the move by 30 days. Trump also scrapped a duty-free exemption for small parcels, known as de minimis, but reinstated it until the Commerce Department has a proper system in place to collect tariff revenue per an executive order.

While the holiday season may have been a bright spot for the retail industry, the past few weeks have become a game of Whack-a-Mole for many companies.

Executives from three agencies that work with e-commerce brands selling across platforms like Amazon, Shopify, and TikTok Shop said the impact of policy changes on e-commerce remains uncertain. But overall, prices of some items sold online may go up, as Trump tries to influence global supply chains.

Recalibration period: The way Vinny O’Brien, producer and consultant at e-commerce agency RMW Commerce, sees it, the initial enthusiasm for Trump's presidency and its promised business-friendly approach has quickly turned to uncertainty.

“There was this great enthusiasm that Trump is going to come in and there was going to be this uncoiling of a spring,” O’Brien told Retail Brew. “Business was going to be so simple.”

Click here to keep reading Retail Brew’s story on how companies are adjusting their supply chains in the wake of tariffs.—VC