United States
Podcast Episode
Ask the Expert: Inside the World of Compliance with Leah Ramos
December 19, 2025
In this episode of Ask the Expert, Leah Ramos, Senior Vice President of Ethics, Compliance, and Audit at STO Building Group, challenges common misconceptions about compliance and reveals its essential role in safeguarding integrity, reputation, and trust. From managing integrity-related risk and supporting market expansion to vetting subcontractors and navigating complex bidding processes, Leah offers an inside look at how compliance operates behind the scenes to help projects—and teams—succeed.
Key Takeaways
- Compliance is about protecting trust, not policing people.
- Integrity-related risk often lives in gray areas where perception and fairness matter.
- Strong compliance programs support confident decision-making across projects.
- Clients benefit from reduced risk, stronger governance, and projects delivered the right way.
Highlights In This Episode
Why compliance isn’t about policing employees, but about prevention, fairness, and protecting people who speak up in good faith.
How the compliance team focuses on integrity-related risks that exist outside the construction process and impact trust, reputation, and relationships.ractions.
Why perception, fairness, and optics matter just as much as legal requirements, even when no law is technically broken.
Empowering employees to do the right thing and inspiring leaders to model ethical behavior.
Policies, training, approvals, and the 24/7 helpline that preserve STOBG’s culture of integrity.
Supporting teams entering new markets, onboarding subcontractors, navigating bids, and managing public-sector requirements.
How strong compliance programs reduce reputational risk and allow clients to focus on building great spaces, not dist
Host
Leah Ramos
CECO Ethics & Compliance
STO Building Group
Leah is responsible for designing and implementing our organization’s compliance and audit programs. In her role, she oversees the day-to-day operations of our compliance and audit teams that are charged with ensuring adequate internal controls and compliance with legal and regulatory requirements and driving a culture of integrity. Before joining STOBG, Leah was the director of financial disclosure compliance and counsel at the New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics, the state agency created to restore public trust in government by enforcing compliance with the state’s ethics and lobbying laws. Her experience in public service was preceded by years as a litigator at Am Law 100 firms, handling complex commercial cases and providing counsel on compliance and labor and employment matters. Early in her career, Leah clerked for a US federal judge, managing cases and drafting orders and opinions in one of the most active federal trial courts in the nation.
Leah graduated from New York City’s Stuyvesant High School and received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania. A proud alumnus of Fordham Law School, Leah was also an adjunct professor there, teaching legal writing and research and lawyering fundamentals to first-year law students.
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