Q: At what point did you start to feel like the traditional periodic sanctions screening model was showing its cracks?

A: Candidly, it was less a single moment and more a slow realization that we were essentially managing risk on an honor system. In state government and higher education, you’re managing tens of thousands of vendors across dozens of departments. We would do our best to screen at onboarding, maybe annually if we were disciplined about it, and then largely used hope that the world stayed static in between. But sanctions lists don’t work on our schedule. OFAC updates can happen overnight. A vendor that was perfectly clean at contract award can be a different story six months later and nobody in the organization would know until someone asked the question. What really started to bother me was recognizing that our compliance posture was largely ceremonial. We were checking a box, not managing a risk.

Q: Public procurement often involves long contract cycles. How does that compound the risk?

A: It compounds it significantly. In public procurement, a three-to-five-year contract is routine. Multi-year IT contracts, facilities management, professional services are typically not short engagements. And the procurement team that screened that vendor at award may not even be there when the contract renews. What people don’t fully appreciate is that ownership structures change, principals change, parent companies get acquired. A vendor you vetted thoroughly in year one may have a very different compliance profile in year three through no fault of their own, or through every fault of their own. And you are still writing them checks. The contract cycle length is not just a risk amplifier, it is also an accountability gap because the question “is this vendor still clean?” between award and renewal is not being asked enough. Plus, public sector do not have the resources to answer that question anyway.

Q: Beyond the compliance risk, what’s the reputational and political exposure?

A: In public procurement, the “we didn’t know” defense is not sufficient. I have been on the receiving end of scrutiny from state auditors, the press, and oversight bodies, and I can tell you that the standard isn’t whether you intended to do something wrong. The standard is whether you had reasonable controls in place to prevent it and the documentation to prove it. If you paid a sanctioned vendor and your answer to the auditor is “we screened them when we signed the contract three years ago,” that’s not a defense. That’s a headline. And in public sector, headlines have careers attached to them. Elected officials, agency directors, procurement officers are held accountable, which is rightfully so. The political dimension makes this especially sharp because even an inadvertent violation becomes a story about misuse of taxpayer dollars. That’s a very different environment than the private sector.

Q: What should procurement leaders be looking for when evaluating solutions in this space?

A: A few things matter a lot. First, continuous monitoring is not just a better way to do periodic batch screening. You want a solution that watches your active vendor population against live sanctions data and alerts you when something changes. Second, integration with your existing ERP or procurement platform. Procurement teams are already stretched thin. If the compliance solution lives in a separate silo that requires manual reconciliation, it won’t get used consistently. Third, audit trail and defensibility. When the auditor comes, and in public sector, they always come eventually, you need to be able to show exactly when a match was flagged, who reviewed it, and what action was taken. That documentation is what separates a clean audit finding from a bad one. And finally, configurability for public sector workflows. Government and higher ed procurement operate under different constraints than commercial organizations. The solution must understand those differences.

Q: You spent years on the buyer side. What made you decide to jump to the private sector, and to Relish specifically?

A: I’d spent the better part of my career trying to solve procurement problems from inside government. And the honest truth is that change is incredibly hard, but so rewarding. When I saw what Relish was building: Solutions specifically designed to close the gaps that ERP platforms leave open, it felt like the same work but from a position where I could scale the impact. We had been a Relish customer before I joined the company. I knew the product worked because we used it. So, when the opportunity came to help bring that capability to the public sector more broadly, the decision wasn’t hard. The problems I spent my career navigating are still out there, in agencies and universities across the country. This is just a better lever to help fix them.

Q: What’s your vision for where Relish fits into the future of public sector compliance?

A: Public sector procurement and accounts payable are both at an inflection point. Funding scrutiny is increasing, regulatory expectations are rising, and the workforce, that has traditionally managed these processes manually, is shrinking. The agencies and institutions that come out ahead are going to be the ones that build compliance infrastructure that runs continuously in the background, not the ones adding more staff to do more manual reviews. Relish fits into that future as the layer between your ERP and your compliance obligations. We’re not replacing procurement systems, we’re making them smarter about risk. In five years, I’d expect continuous supplier monitoring to be the standard for any public sector organization of meaningful size. Right now, we are still in the early adopter phase. That window won’t stay open long, especially as auditor attention on the public sector increases, which again, is a good thing since public sector are being stewards of taxpayer and/or tuition dollars.

Q: What do your friends and family think you actually do for work?

A; They think I run AI, as in program it. I have stopped trying to correct them. My more persistent family members have landed on “something with AI” which is honestly close enough. The short version I’ve settled on is this: I help public sector automate the verification of vendors and automate invoice payments. That usually gets a nod and a subject change, which is the best outcome at a family dinner.

Q: Favorite place to vacation?

A: Anywhere that has golf course and the beach in close proximity. Golf is the greatest game ever invented, so golfing in the morning and sitting on the beach in the afternoon is elite, as the youth say.