Comptroller general of the United States David M. Walker.

David M. Walker may seem like any other typical accountant, but there is nothing typical about his job or, more recently, about the way he's reaching out to his employers--the 300 million or so members of the tax-paying public.

As comptroller general of the United States, Walker has been

using his platform as the nation's chief accountability officer and head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to sound the alarm that the federal government is spending its way toward a $50 trillion bank-breaking deficit unless the next president and Congress start to enact reforms.

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Walker began his "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour" in September 2005, and has barnstormed the country in town-hall-style forums as well as taken his message to various media outlets from CBS' 60 Minutes to Comedy Central's Colbert Report and to his own video on You Tube.

Before his appointment to a 15-year term as comptroller general in November 1998, Walker had extensive executive-level experience in both the government and private industry. Between 1989 and 1998, he worked at Chicago-based Arthur Andersen LLP, where he was a partner and global managing director of the human capital services practice in Atlanta.

He was also a member of the board of Arthur Andersen Financial Advisors, a registered investment adviser. While a partner at Arthur Andersen, Walker served as a public trustee for Social Security and Medicare from 1990 to 1995. Before joining Arthur Andersen, he was assistant secretary of labor for pension and welfare benefit programs from 1987 to 1989, and in 1985 he was acting executive director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, Washington, D.C.

Walker currently serves as chair of the U.S. Intergovernmental Audit Forum and as chair of the principals of the U.S. Joint Financial Management Improvement Program. He is also a founder and principal of the U.S. Joint Auditing Standards Coordinating Forum.

Walker is a certified public accountant (CPA). He has a bachelor of science degree in accounting from Florida-based Jacksonville University and a senior management in government certificate in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mortgage Banking recently interviewed Walker about his "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour" and his very sobering economic outlook.