Two relatively young lawyers have been designated as undersecretary and assistant secretary at the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), the agency’s website showed.
Based on the information posted on the site, lawyer Manuel Anthony S. Tan has been appointed as undersecretary while fellow lawyer Kristoffer L. Tiansay was named as assistant secretary for regional operations and countryside ICT development.
Like the recent appointment of Arnold “Ali” Atienza as undersecretary and lawyer Gerald James B. Reyes as assistant secretary, the DICT did not formally announce their actual date of assumption into office.
The new appointments mean that the agency now has seven undersecretaries and four assistant secretaries. All are male, including the secretary, Gregorio “Gringo” Honasan II.
As the DICT did not provide the profiles of the new officials, little is known about them. Tan, who became a lawyer in 2011 and is formerly the agency’s OIC director for procurement service, does not even have a photo online.
Tiansay, meanwhile, is a co-founder of his Makati City-based law firm VTD Law. He was also admitted to the Bar in 2011 after obtaining his law degree from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2010.
Republic Act 10844 or the law that created the DICT, provides for only three undersecretaries — two of whom should be career officers. But among the seven undersecretaries, only one – undersecretary for the national ICT assets index Denis Villorente – is a career official.
The same law mandates that two of the assistant secretaries shall be career officers. However, none of the current four assistant secretaries are career executives.
