Barry Johnson is a nonresident fellow in the Urban-Brooking Tax Policy Center. His research focuses on expanding access to data for evidence building, methods for protecting data confidentiality, and the distributions of income and wealth. His recent work focuses on developing new tiers of researcher data access, including synthetic tax data and methods for producing an automated, privacy-preserving validation server. He is also assisting with the planning and development of the National Secure Data Service. 

Before joining Urban, Barry was the Chief Data and Analytics Officer at the Internal Revenue Service, the Director of the IRS Statistics of Income Division, and the Statistical Official for the Department of the Treasury. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and a recipient of the Roger Herriot Award for Innovation in Federal Statistics. He holds a bachelor’s degree in finance and economics with honors from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in economics from The American University.