Cynthia Bridges has served as Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Revenue since 2000, managing a $95 million budget and 902 employees. At the Department, Bridges has secured funding and presided over the conversion of 20 taxes from a 30-year old mainframe system to a server-based Integrated Tax System. She promoted process improvement initiatives that transformed obsolete, redundant, and inefficient processes, and reorganized business units to improve the delivery of services and minimize costs.

Bridges also implemented LaTAP, Louisiana's Taxpayer Access Point, providing business tax-payers around-the-clock secure internet access to tax accounts for various transactions previously done by mail or phone, culminating in a total of 31 percent of business returns being filed electronically in Fiscal Year 2006-2007. Additionally, she led the formation and implementation of legislation to establish uniformity with other states for tracking motor fuel movements and tax collections. Bridges also worked to improve the public’s understanding of tax requirements and to encourage voluntary compliance through community partnerships and multi-media campaigns.

From 1998 to 2000, Bridges served as the Deputy Secretary Director of the Department of Revenue, and she previously served as the Director of the Excise Taxes Division of the Department of Revenue from 1997 to 1998.

Bridges was named one of Baton Rouge's 2007 “Influential Women in Business” and was instrumental in obtaining the “2005 Award for Technology Application by Federation of Tax Administrators” and the “2005 Partnership Award from the Internal Revenue Service.” Bridges is a Certified Public Accountant and a graduate of the Strategic Leadership for State Executives course at Duke University in Durham, NC, the Re-engineering Management Training at the IBM Business Partner Executive Institute in New York, the Fundamentals of Money Management Program at the Wharton School of the Aresty Institute of Executive Education in Philadelphia, PA, and has a bachelor’s of science from the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.