Laura Cox Kaplan

Laura has more than 24 years of experience in communications, corporate governance, stakeholder engagement, and public policy strategy. As the Principal-in-Charge of Government, Regulatory Affairs and Public Policy for professional services and accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, Laura has spent more than 11 years managing the firm’s public policy engagement strategy, and almost a decade on the executive management team of PwC. She also provides advice to PwC clients, particularly at the executive and board level on developments in public policy and on effective techniques for Washington engagement. Laura is the first woman to hold her position at PwC.

Laura also lends her experience and voice publicly to a range of topics important to the public and private sectors including career and talent development, the importance of developing a diversified workforce and of the value of diversified teams, women’s leadership, and corporate governance. She employs the latest social media tools for enhancing stakeholder engagement on these and other topics important to PwC.

Laura also serves on PwC’s Global Public Policy and Regulatory Board, which coordinates public policy strategies across the more than 150 countries in which PwC operates. She is the Chair of the AICPA’s Federal Legislative Task Force, which coordinates strategies for shaping legislative policy that impact the accounting profession, and is a member of the Center for Audit Quality’s Executive Management committee (Laura was instrumental in helping to create the CAQ including working to help ensure that independent investor interests were reflected on the organization’s board).

Prior to joining PwC, Laura served in senior positions at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where she focused on the legislative and regulatory response to corporate governance and accounting failures in the late 1990s, and on the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. She spent almost 10 years on Capitol Hill as a senior communications strategist.

Laura also serves on a number of non-profit boards including:
Running Start (Board Member), All in Together (Board Member), Global Women in Innovation (Board Chair), and Value in Electing Women (Board Member). She is also on the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation’s Development Committee, the National Women’s History Museum’s Development Committee and supports development and fundraising efforts at her children’s school. She also served on the Launch Committee for Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” Foundation.

In 2015, Laura was named one of Washingtonian Magazine’s 100 Most Powerful Women in Washington.

Laura received a Master’s degree from American University in Washington, D.C. and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas in Austin. Laura and her husband Joel live with their son and daughter in Washington, D.C.