JDG closes search for GAO’s first Chief Data Scientist

JDG and the Government Accountability Office are excited to welcome Taka Ariga as its first Chief Data Scientist and Director of the Audit Innovation Lab.  As federal agencies implement digital modernization efforts, it is essential that GAO has an effective and rigorous capacity to make sense of hidden correlations, behaviors, relationships, patterns, and anomalies.  Mr. Ariga will play an integral role as a part of GAO’s Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) team, helping transform ways that GAO incubates and implements new advanced analytical capabilities to distill insights that are expected to greatly impact auditing practices.  He brings 20 years of hands-on data science leadership working with audit, compliance, legal, and regulated entities across public sector and commercial organizations.  Partnering with GAO’s stakeholder communities, he will help develop sustained orchestration across data engineering, technologies, analytical techniques, consumption models, and change management.

Prior to joining GAO, he held executive positions at Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and Booz Allen Hamilton.  He was most recently the Principal Data Scientist for the Global Ethics & Compliance organization at the Albemarle Corporation.  Mr. Ariga graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering and received a Business Analytics Certificate from Indiana University.