GDS Associates & Penn. PUC
Danny Kermode, CPA–Retired, is a Senior Consultant at GDS Associates with more than 40 years of experience in public utility regulation, regulatory accounting and auditing. He previously served as Accounting Advisor and Assistant Director for Water at the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission. Kermode teaches for the Institute of Public Utilities and was instrumental in FERC’s adoption of XBRL.
Kelly Monaghan, CPA, is the Deputy Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission with extensive experience in utility auditing, financial oversight, and regulatory policy. She previously directed the PUC’s Audit Bureau and served as Chair of the NARUC Staff Subcommittee on Accounting and Finance, providing national leadership on regulatory accounting and education.
Public utility regulation today faces a paradox: More data than ever, with less time to make sense of it. Alvin Toffler warned of future shock, a disorientation caused when change outpaces adaptability. Buckminster Fuller, futurist and systems theorist, observed that knowledge grows exponentially. Together, their frameworks explain why state utility commissions now battle information overload, solution fragmentation, and outdated regulatory tools.
An effective path forward would be the design and adoption of a jurisdiction-aware XBRL taxonomy to transform the tsunami of utility filings into structured, comparable information that enhances coherence, transparency, and trust in economic regulation while improving auditability and comparability across jurisdictions. This approach is consistent with the NARUC three-year theme of Uniting Regulators and Harmonizing Impact.
Future Shock
In 2026, Toffler’s 1970 classic “Future Shock” no longer reads like a bold prediction; it feels like a diagnosis. Much like culture shock, which results from a person’s struggle when adapting to unfamiliar settings, future shock arises from the accelerating pace of technological change and its disruptive impact on the environments we inhabit.