Baker Tilly Imprints | 2024 Impact Report
We're listening
Ethics and governance
Our people and purpose
Stewardship
Inclusion and belonging
Overview
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ARTICLE
Jump-start your sustainability road map with an ESG maturity assessment
Aligning ESG risks with existing ERM program key for creating value, attracting talent
Here at Baker Tilly, staying connected with our stakeholders is key to shaping our client experience strategy. We’re always listening to what matters most to them and ensuring they are centered in the conversation, helping us build strong, lasting relationships across all our stakeholder groups. By regularly engaging via surveys, interviews and other conversations, we ensure we’re on the same page and demonstrate how our values and actions align and grow together.
Starting in 2022, we began to survey key stakeholders to understand what ESG topics matter to them and what they think is material to Baker Tilly. That year we started internally with our team members and then expanded our scope to our clients in 2023.
Based on this data, we formulated a materiality matrix as an input for our goal setting and decision making. In 2024, we conducted a comprehensive survey targeting team members, clients and, newly added, suppliers and vendors. We plan to refresh our matrix every other year.
With little movement across all topics, our results stayed consistent compared to prior surveys. Across all stakeholder groups, these topics rose to the top: data privacy and cybersecurity; ethics, compliance and independence; employee health, safety and well-being; and talent attraction, retention and development. Innovation and research and development, and corporate governance closely followed for internal and external stakeholders, respectively. See the matrix below.
Environmental sustainability
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2024 Impact Report
Baker Tilly Foundation – Fiscal year 2024
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Stewardship is a core value woven into the fabric of our firm. We believe in investing in the future with the intention to leave everything better. This commitment manifests in countless ways, including the professional services we provide and the volunteer hours we dedicate.
The Baker Tilly Foundation, through the Baker Tilly Wishes program, brings our philanthropic efforts together to help enhance and protect our communities and to inspire each other to do good every day.
For example, in 2024, we saw record-breaking participation in our annual Baker Tilly Wishes giving program, with more team members than ever nominating organizations to receive the 15 $10,000 grants from the Baker Tilly Foundation.
For the eighth consecutive year, we gifted every team member with $25 to donate to their favorite causes, totaling more than $131,000, on Giving Tuesday.
During Stewardship Week, our annual week of volunteering, thousands of team members came together to serve the communities where we live and work. This year’s efforts resulted in over 7,000 volunteer hours logged across 91 locations, supporting food banks, homeless shelters, environmental cleanups and youth mentorship programs.
As a follow-up to this week of giveback, the Baker Tilly Foundation extended our spirit of generosity with Extra Impact Grants. Launched in 2022, this program gives 10 organizations in 10 U.S. cities an Extra Impact Grant of $5,000 each.
These combined efforts demonstrate our firm’s deep-rooted belief in giving back and building stronger communities.
Our people, making a difference
Baker Tilly Foundation Grants Wishes in Annual Giving Campaign
DevelUp’ing our communities
Inclusion and belonging at Baker Tilly
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At Baker Tilly, our dedication to fostering connections is unwavering and rooted in our core value of belonging. With our people, our clients and our communities, we understand that to make a difference, we must evolve our organization, embed our values and tailor our approaches.
In 2024, we continued to focus on incorporating diversity, inclusion, belonging and societal impact (DIBS) into our everyday work, from engaging in national research and discussions around inclusion to growing our activation plans across our firm.
Our internal networks, which are open to all team members, continue as a vital platform for our team members to forge meaningful bonds. Whether connecting veterans, caregivers, the LBGTQ+ community or health and wellbeing enthusiasts, these groups play a crucial role in creating an inclusive environment.
Our DIBS steering committee helps us focus on driving business and talent strategy, while many team members take action to bring our core values to life. What does that collective impact look like? From 2023 to 2024, the number of women in leadership roles increased from 39.1% to 42.6%, our team members of color rose from 23% to 24.3%, and 89% of our team members across our firm participated in DIBS activities and networks.
Looking outside our four walls, Baker Tilly also participated in a national Coqual research spotlight that studied the workplace experience of Hispanic and Latino employees. By actively joining in conversations with dynamic groups across the country, we gained an increased understanding about what we are doing well, what we can improve and what the broader needs of our team members may be.
When we amplify the power of being seen, heard and valued, we pave the way to strengthening how we live and work together. As we look to the future, we have renewed enthusiasm for continuing to nurture the Baker Tilly culture.
Together, we thrive
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Our people are at the core of our business strategy and, therefore, at the heart of what we do for our clients. Creating a positive, standout workplace environment with opportunity at every turn tops our list of priorities.
"Belonging is at the heart of the human experience, nurturing our growth and potential. We want our people to feel empowered by this, embracing chances to learn, innovate and unlock opportunities to be their best." — Amy Ward, Chief People Officer
Our organization’s purpose is to unleash and amplify talent, while sparking innovation through fresh thinking. We are built for go-getters who want to make an impact, and throughout 2024, we opened doors for team members to learn, grow and collaborate, while also supporting their overall well-being.
We support team members through every stage of their careers, with support for earning a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) license, on-demand learning for all levels and specialized programs for leaders, all meant to stretch one’s skillset and encourage career advancement.
In 2024, more than 500 team members applied for internal opportunities, with nearly 22% being placed, and 918 team members, accounting for 15% of our entire employee base, earned promotions. Our leaders, who collectively boast 16,000 hours of formal coaching, continue to cultivate talent every day.
Skills and advancement are only half of the story. We know supporting the whole person is crucial to creating success, and we have many examples of our ever-deepening network of benefits aimed at enriching our team members’ lives.
Our benefits, including top-notch medical, 401(k), fitness reimbursements, mental health support, childcare options, student loan repayment and pet adoption reimbursement, to name a few, grew in 2024 with expanded parental leave.
Our dedication to our team members as people, not just employees, earned us awards as a top place to work in many categories, including on Forbes list of Best Employers for Women in 2024. However, what means the most is the high number of team members who continue their careers at Baker Tilly.
As we look to 2025, we plan to move forward with a new talent strategy focused on long-term sustainability and a “we” mindset that will continue our positive momentum.
Where opportunity thrives
Legal & Privacy Notices | Baker Tilly
Legal & Privacy Notices for Applicants and Employees | Baker Tilly
CCPA Consumer Privacy Notice | Baker Tilly
Baker Tilly – Online Privacy Policy | Baker Tilly
LEGAL AND PRIVACY NOTICES
In our profession, integrity and trust are nonnegotiable. Our clients trust us to handle sensitive information and guide their business. Our people trust us to make the right decisions for our organization and make good on our promises.
Integrity is the cornerstone of our relationships with clients and each other, building trust and protecting our reputation, which is why integrity is one of Baker Tilly’s core values.
Throughout the year, we keep ethics front of mind with top-notch training, updated policies and annual compliance practices.
Annually, we require all practitioners to confirm their independence by completing a questionnaire and training. In 2024, 100% of our team members completed their requirements.
To strengthen our culture of safety and professionalism our team members spent 9,075 hours on our annual Preventing Workplace Harassment training.
Our team members spend over 7,100 hours on required monthly training that showcase real-life scenarios to keep smart practices front of mind.
Use of AI technology supports our purpose by helping us identify and streamline time-consuming tasks, so our team members can have more time to focus on meaningful work. As we grow our use of AI, we’re committed to doing so responsibly and ensuring compliance with U.S. privacy laws.
Doubling down on integrity, Baker Tilly continues to improve its policies and procedures for upholding regulatory compliance, providing the best client service and keeping our people in the know by doing the following:
Our new Quality Management Committee uses a formalized review process to address independence, inspection and client issues, helping us learn from mistakes and reward exemplary results.
Our new Enterprise Change Advisory Board helps us avoid any unforeseen disruption in how we work, how we deliver work to our clients and how we measure data by examining each and every business, application or data change that comes our way.
In 2024, we unveiled our next five-year strategic plan through 2030 with the intent that every single stakeholder — from principals to associates — understands how they play a part.
Integrity: Ingrained in who we are
Measuring our footprint
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Becoming a more environmentally sustainable organization isn’t contained within a small taskforce: it’s an all-out effort that crosses over many functional borders.
Last year, we put foundational elements, such as a technological solution, in place to help us report on our carbon footprint. This year, our focus moved to data collection from every corner possible: real estate, utilities, travel, finances, purchasing, supply chain, policies, risk and our business strategy, to name a few. Along that road of discovery, we continued to bring eye-opening awareness of the importance of this work to our people.
True to our culture, we sought to understand before putting strategy into place. From a compliance standpoint, this was key. In this report, you will learn the approach we took and the progress we made toward the California Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act requirements using the Task Force Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) framework.
Other great examples of positive action that highlighted 2024 include Earth Day festivities, recycling success, green events and, of course, pragmatic and fruitful guidance for our clients.
At the end of 2025, we expect to finalize our TCFD report for publishing, expand our environment-related policies and pursue a triple-bottom-line purchasing process, as always with the intent of leaving everything better.
Preparing for the trek
“Doing what's right is ingrained in who we are. We understand the connections between our people, our clients, our communities and our planet and how each fuels the others’ success. Our commitment to them is smart business.” — Jeff Ferro, Baker Tilly CEO
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Business partner perspective
Team member perspective
Sustain/communicate
Prioritize
Monitor, comply, manage
Continue internal efforts
Greenhouse gas emissions
Social issue
management
Corporate governance structure
Waste management and recycling
Water management
Crisis management
Overall environmental stewardship
Philanthropy and volunteerism
Community engagement
Innovation and R&D
Diversity, equity and inclusion
Data privacy and
cybersecurity
Talent attraction,
retention and
development
Ethics, compliance and independence
Employee health, safety and well-being
Energy management
Supplier management
Environmental
Social
Governance
Materiality Matrix - Importance for Baker Tilly
Shattering the confines of traditional thinking to ignite innovation
Environmental sustainability
Ethics and governance
Stewardship
Our people
and purpose
Diversity, equity and inclusion
Overview