The government is making billions off tariffs. PwC estimated the Treasury pulled in $89 billion as of September and $108 billion by the end of October. And that month, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan nonprofit, reported that “the federal government raised $195 billion in customs duties in Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, more than 250% of what it collected in FY 2024.”

“This is obviously a lot of sugar for the folks in the customs and the government,” Chris Desmond, principal in the customs and international trade group at PwC, told CFO Brew. “People don’t like to give up that sugar.”

So the critical CFO concern over tariffs and mitigation strategies from 2025 will continue to be an obstacle in 2026 and beyond. Experts advise CFOs to start planning long-term for tariffs.

“Tariffs are no longer a temporary headwind but a fixture of the economic landscape, and 2026 strategies reflect that reality,” Ryan Steck, CFO of Ignite Spot, an accounting and bookkeeping company, wrote in an email to CFO Brew.

Keep reading.—JK

Would have been nice if sustainability compliance’s 2025 horoscope had warned us about the trials ahead.

Last year, the SEC essentially dropped its proposed climate disclosure rule, while the EU watered down its ESG compliance. Some called it the year of greenhushing, in which companies continue to work to combat climate change but don’t go out of their way to publicize it. Other companies truly did retreat from commitments. And the US didn’t attend the COP30 global climate negotiations in November.

What does all this mean for the future? Brigham McNaughton, partner in sustainability at PwC, thinks that sustainability compliance in 2026 will be the year of “interoperability.” In the context of sustainability, interoperability means ensuring that financial and other data can be exchanged between different software systems, reporting agencies, and overlapping frameworks.

“What are the processes, tools, governance to be able to look through that for any slices or cuts that I need for individual jurisdictions?” McNaughton added.

McNaughton told us his clients previously expected that as the SEC put climate disclosure regulations in place, they would have fewer redundant, varied, and piecemeal disclosure rules to deal with. But with the SEC rule mostly moot, CFOs, sustainability officers, and compliance teams are having to figure out a new strategy: finding “the most efficient way to thread the needle across the different disclosure obligations,” he said.

With that in mind, here are three sustainability disclosure developments to keep an eye on for 2026.

Keep reading.—JK

DEI has faced immense pressure since the 2024 election cycle, largely from the second iteration of the Trump administration. Executive orders and directives from the Departments of Labor and Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) aimed to deter employers from pursuing diversity practices, HR Brew previously reported.

The political fear campaign appears to have at least partially worked: Roughly 63 Fortune 100 companies have rebranded or eliminated the DEI messaging that appeared on their websites since the summer of 2024, an HR Brew analysis found. Of those companies, 54 made their changes following the 2024 presidential election.

“The Trump administration did a very good job of putting out a narrative of fear and of misinformation that became very hard to combat, quite frankly, as practitioners,” according to Evelyn Carter, a DEI expert and author of the forthcoming book, Was That Racist? In some cases, she said, businesses seem to have continued the work internally, without publicizing it externally.

“It [the data] implies to us that these rollbacks weren’t ideological. They’re fear-based. They’re shortcut-based,” Jarvis Sam, founder and CEO of the Rainbow Disruption, a DEI consultancy, told HR Brew. “What I listen for is, show me the system that makes merit real, and a lot of what they underpin it with is some of the exact same approaches that are the foundation of how we define and talk about DEI.”

Keep reading on HR Brew.—KP

If AI headlines feel like a forecasting distraction, you’re not alone. Jeremiah Edwards will walk through where AI is quietly improving accuracy and internal controls right now. Think less “visionary keynote,” more “this actually works on Tuesday.” Consider it your filter for what’s hype and what’s helpful. Register now.