Modernizing to Attract and Retain Government Finance Talent

February 9, 2026

The government finance talent shortage is no longer a forecast. It’s the reality.

GFOA is reporting demand for public finance officers is outstripping supply, making talent retention the number-one concern among its members.

Add to that data showing 54% of state and local governments expect the largest wave of retirements is still ahead, and you have a staffing crisis with no easy fix.

Meeting this moment with the old playbook, the one built for a stable six-person team of 20-year veterans, isn’t feasible anymore.

What’s needed are creative ways to protect institutional knowledge, reduce manual workload, and keep lean teams delivering at the level your community expects.

Here are four strategies we believe will make all the difference.

1. Evolve the finance director role

The role of the local government finance director is changing. Finance directors are increasingly expected to lead analytics efforts, engage with communities, and collaborate across departments. The job is no longer just compliance and reporting. It is strategic leadership.

Governments that frame the position this way attract a different caliber of candidate. Younger finance professionals want to do meaningful analytical work and shape their communities. They do not want to spend months reformatting spreadsheets. When you redefine the role around strategy and analysis, and automate the manual grind, you make the job worth pursuing.

2. Bridge gaps with virtual CFOs and just-in-time talent

Not every gap needs a full-time hire. Virtual CFOs and just-in-time contract talent are becoming practical options for local governments that cannot wait months to fill a critical position. A virtual CFO provides high-level financial guidance remotely, while just-in-time talent brings specialized expertise for specific projects or peak periods like budget season.

As documented in GFOA’s Government Finance Review, multiple governments have used these approaches successfully. One county brought in a contract budget director remotely after their budget director resigned mid-transition to new software. The budget process stayed on track and the system launched on deadline. A small city used a virtual CFO combined with contract analysts after their finance lead left behind a dysfunctional department. Within six months, accounts were fully reconciled and the budget was produced on time.

These are not permanent solutions. They are bridges that keep operations running while you find the right long-term hire and prevent the kind of institutional collapse that makes it even harder to recruit.

3. Modernize the tools your team works with every day

Talented finance professionals do not want to spend 200 hours manually formatting an ACFR in Excel and Word. They want to analyze data, advise leadership, and build financial strategies for their communities. When your heaviest lifts still require months of copy-paste formatting, you are burning out the people you have and repelling the ones you are trying to hire.

The question public agencies keep asking is how to make ACFR creation less time-consuming and what is the best way to simplify preparation. The answer is modern local government financial software that automates the manual grind. When compliance validation, formatting, and version control are built into the system, your team spends less time chasing deadlines and more time doing the work that attracted them to government finance in the first place.

Modernizing tools is not just an efficiency play. It is a retention play. And it makes onboarding new hires dramatically easier, because the process lives in the software rather than in one person’s head.

4. Invest in succession planning before you need it

According to the MissionSquare 2024 State and Local Workforce Survey, only 12% of state and local governments have a formal succession plan in place. Another 20% are developing one. That leaves the majority with no structured approach for what happens when their most experienced people leave.

Succession planning does not have to be a massive HR initiative. It starts with identifying where institutional knowledge lives and building systems that capture it by design. When processes are structured into software rather than spreadsheets, they survive staff changes. Cross-training becomes easier when the system guides the work. New hires become productive faster because they are not decoding 15 years of someone else’s Excel macros.

The bottom line

The government finance talent shortage is not going away. Compensation gaps, a shrinking CPA pipeline, and an aging workforce will continue to put pressure on lean teams for years to come. The finance departments that thrive will be the ones that stop trying to solve a structural problem with the same approaches that created it.

Evolve the role. Build flexible talent models. Modernize your tools. Plan for transitions before they happen. These are not separate initiatives. They reinforce each other.

Take the next step

If your ACFR process is one of the heaviest lifts consuming your team’s time, start there.

Read the Complete Guide to ACFR Modernization to understand what modernization involves.

Or request a demo to see how Gravity’s Disclosure Studio helps lean finance teams deliver award-ready reports in days instead of months.