Audit/IG SVP Kevin Iverson Looks Back on a 44-Year Government Career, Including 16 at the Exchange

In 1983, Kevin Iverson was about three years into a job at the Air Force Audit Agency when he traveled to what was Norton Air Force Base in California for an important meeting.

He made it to Norton. His luggage didn’t. The Exchange was the solution. As a DoD civilian, he was allowed to buy essential items while TDY. In this case, since he didn’t have a car to allow him to shop off base, clothing was considered essential—especially given the nature of the meeting.

“I didn’t have a suit, I didn’t have dress shoes, and the next day I was meeting the Air Force auditor, a three-star general equivalent,” said Iverson, senior vice president of the Inspector General & Audit Division.

“Here I am, a GS-7, a couple of years out of college. I thought, ‘I can’t meet him the way I am.’ So I went to the Exchange and bought a suit. I couldn’t find a pair of men’s shoes that I liked, so I bought a pair of cowboy boots I just loved.”

Twenty-five years later, he still had the boots.

“In 2008, when I had to come in for an interview with [then-Exchange Commander] Gen. Keith Thurgood, I wore those boots,” Iverson said. “And I got the job! I’d put three or four sets of soles on those boots and maybe seven or eight heels, because they would wear out, but the top of them still looked as good as when I got them. They were probably my favorite purchase I’d ever made at an Exchange.”

Like those boots, Iverson has endured—through a 44-year government career, including the past 16 years at the Exchange. That will come to an end when he retires this summer—after a lot of steps along the way.

Growing up in a military town

Iverson was born and raised in Minot, North Dakota. His parents weren’t in the military, but both of them had connections to the Minot AFB Exchange.

“At the time, there was an old VA hospital downtown,” Iverson said. “It was also used as the base hospital, even though it was 10 or 12 miles from the actual base. A friend of my mom’s worked in the little Exchange gift shop there. It was a one-person shop and her friend said, ‘Can you fill in when I can’t make it to work or when I go on vacation?’ So my mom did that for a couple of years.”

His dad worked for Sweetheart Bakery, a local bakery that made deliveries to the Minot main store, the Shoppette, the dining hall and the commissary.

“Every evening, I’d go down and help him load his truck after we had dinner, and then he’d take off for work at 5 in the morning,” Iverson said. “It was against company policy to have kids ride along, but I loved helping him load his bread truck. The smell of fresh-baked bread was just amazing.”

Iverson also spent time with his grandfather, a World War I Veteran. “He didn’t talk about it much even though I spent a lot of summers with him when I was a kid because he had a farm 70 miles from Minot. I was a farm kid in the summer, a city kid in the winter. I thought it was the best combo because I learned how to be both.”

Although they lived off-base, several of his friends had parents in the military.

“That was some of my first exposure to military life,” Iverson said. “I also had uncles who were in the military who would talk about their experiences fondly.”

The road to the Exchange

While in high school, Iverson took two years of accounting classes and discovered that he liked it.

“It fit the way my brain worked,” he said. “It made sense. The idea that things have to match up on both sides of a balance sheet was very logical. That led to auditing. It’s logical how a process can be efficient, how you set up oversight controls, how you need to make sure things work well.”

It was a few years before Iverson had an accounting job, but in high school and college he was already demonstrating a strong work ethic. During his freshman and sophomore years in high school, he would shovel snow from the sidewalks in front of a JC Penney before heading to school, a couple of blocks away.

Prior to graduation, Iverson got a job at a Piggly Wiggly grocery store, starting as a bagger, then working up to night manager by the time he was an accounting major in college.

When he was a senior, there was an opportunity to work for a small certified public accounting firm in Minot. Although he was on a management track at Piggly Wiggly, he wasn’t sure that was what he wanted for his future, so he applied for the job at the CPA firm and was hired.

“I spent about nine months at the CPA firm and found out that I hated doing taxes and financial statements,” Iverson said, “I thought, ‘What did I do? I’ve got this accounting degree and I’m going to graduate within a few months, and I don’t think this is what I want to do.’”

But then the Air Force Audit Agency was conducting interviews for internal auditors. The opportunity appealed to him.

“It seemed fascinating,” Iverson said. “It’s more looking at efficiency, effectiveness, compliance and those sorts of things. It was interesting, analytical stuff. I was lucky that they offered me a job, and it turned into a 44-year government career.”

While he was with AFAA, Iverson advanced to positions of increased responsibility, and led or conducted audits specific to aircraft maintenance, civil engineering, logistics, contracting, health care and more. The job required a breadth of knowledge, much of which he gained on the job.

“With the Air Force, I audited anything from weapons to Minuteman III missiles,” he said. “You’ve got to make sure you do things right, or there are consequences that could be life-threatening. There’s real value in what you’re doing and making sure that people are following the right processes.

“As an internal auditor, you learn how to learn quickly,” he added. “That’s one of the greatest skills for audit. You go into an area, you read about the policies and procedures. Whether you’re counting bombs in the Air Force or counting how much cat food is on the shelves at an Exchange, it’s accounting. It’s keeping track of inventory. It’s having controls that allow you to know what is there and when it’s there.”

Iverson took a break from the Air Force Audit Agency to work for Health and Human Services in Bemidji, Minnesota, about 325 miles east of Minot. They wanted to live in the area, where his wife’s brother lived. There was an opportunity to interview for a job as head of the HHS accounting and procurement office.

“I said ‘We’re going to be there anyway, so I’ll do this interview and see what happens,’” he said. “And they wanted me, so we moved there. They had social services, child protection, elderly protection. I liked the accounting. I would brief the county commissioners each month.

Then he was promoted to deputy director, and struggled with aspects of the job.

“It was the director and myself,” Iverson said. “Whenever we were going to do child-protective placements, we had to approve those, and that wasn’t me. I lost too much sleep. I couldn’t go to sleep after hearing the stories. I have so much respect for social workers. They can get in the mindset of ‘I’m here to help and I’m going to do what I can.’ I just couldn’t let go of those stories.”

Iverson returned to AFAA, where he continued to advance in jobs that took him and his family to what was then Griffiss AFB in New York, Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota, Offutt AFB in Nebraska (where he was Office Chief and supervised audits in nine states) and Brooks City Base (now closed) in the San Antonio area.

Then the Exchange came calling.

Reaching the destination and going beyond

In 2008, the Exchange’s director of internal audit was someone from the Air Force Audit Agency. When it was time for a change in the position, AAFA recommended three candidates and Iverson was selected.

After five years, the position was changed from being on loan from AFAA to a fulltime Exchange associate. Iverson retired from AFAA, interviewed for the Exchange job he already had, and got it. Not long afterward, he was named Audit director. After CEO/Director Tom Shull came to the Exchange in 2012, the decision was made to combine Audit and the Office of the Inspector General. When the directorates were combined, Shull promoted Iverson to senior vice president of Audit and IG. Iverson made the transition smoothly.

“There was some learning curve, because there are investigations that you have to do that might involve sensitive issues,” Iverson said  “But a lot of things are very similar. In inspection on the IG side, you’re not looking at things as deeply as you do with an audit, but a lot of the same things apply. It’s still oversight controls. But the learning curve didn’t take long and we have a good team. It really blended together and it was nice because then you had more tools in your toolbox.”

One of the most memorable things from his tenure as an SVP was getting to work on the Veterans online shopping benefit that launched in 2017.

“Mr. Shull asked me to be an advisor on that,” Iverson said. “I couldn’t be a voting member on the committee that was trying to bring it into being, but I helped make sure we set up good controls for when we added all these Veterans, and made sure it was secure and properly managed.

“Active-duty personnel were concerned: ‘Now that all these other people are going to be able to shop, is the merchandise going to be there when I want to shop?’ Merchandising was saying, ‘We’ve got this. There won’t be a shortage.’ It was fun to be a part of making sure that the controls were set up so that it worked well. And it did work well. There weren’t any significant problems for the people who could already shop. And they certainly earned that.”

Retirement plans

Iverson’s government career, before and during the Exchange, has allowed him to see the world.

“I’ve been to Kuwait,” he said. “We had an IG project where we had to go downrange briefly. But I’ve never deployed. But I got to see the world because the Exchange is a worldwide operation. I’ve been to the Pacific, to Europe and over the United States. Between the Exchange and the Air Force, I’ve been to most of the states in the country.”

Upon retirement, he plans to spend most of his time in Mansfield, a Dallas-Fort Worth area city roughly 20 miles southwest of Exchange headquarters.

“When my wife and I came to Texas, two of our daughters were still in Nebraska from my time at Offutt, and the youngest one was still living with us,” Iverson said. “The other two ended up moving to Texas later. So I’m going to stay here.”

“My youngest daughter, Nikki, just started working with the Exchange on the Policy side. She saw how the Exchange has supported me and decided she wanted to work here. My middle daughter is deputy director of nutrition for a school district in the Houston area and looks forward to having me help with home improvement projects, traveling and going to events together. My oldest daughter works for the Mansfield school district as an events coordinator for their Performing Arts Center. She asked me to do some volunteer work over there.”

Iverson, who inherited a DIY ethic from his father, says he will also do some home remodeling and traveling—including to North Dakota, where his mother, 91, and mother-in-law,  92 still live. “I’ll spend some summertime up there, keeping up with their homes and helping them because they’re still living independently. I’ll do plumbing, carpentry and things like that.”

But he will miss the camaraderie of the Exchange.

“Everybody is so supportive here,” he said. “They support one another, no matter what. And they support our mission. If you support each other and support our mission, that is family serving family, because we’re serving military families, retirees, dependents. We do the same for our own associates.

“I deeply appreciate all the great support from all our Audit & IG team members,” he added. “They have been the most important part of identifying continuous process improvements. And I’m thankful to all the Exchange executives, managers and associates as they have embraced and worked with us to implement the recommended improvements. It is such an honor to be a part of the greatest Family Serving Family team.”

Kevin Iverson’s retirement ceremony will be at 10 a.m. July 25 in the Braswell Auditorium at Exchange headquarters. Lunch will be served afterward in the Skyline Club on the sixth floor.

If you’d like to wish Kevin well on his retirement journey, please comment on this story.