January 4, 2016 9:12 pm by RITCHIE A. HORARIO, REPORTER
THE Energy Regulatory Commission
(ERC) is hiring more people this year to strengthen its ranks and improve
operations.
ERC Commissioner Jose Vicente
Salazar said the agency plans to hire 508 more personnel to build up its legal
office and address the backlog of pending cases.
He said beefing up the commission’s
field offices is also included in their enhancement program.
“We will hire additional people to
strengthen legal offices, services and elevate divisions to create services,”
said Salazar.
At the same time, Salazar added that
the ERC also plans to upgrade its information technology (IT) infrastructure so
that stakeholders can submit documents through the internet.
In carrying out the project, the ERC
has created a technical working group (TWG) which will be assisted by experts
from the World Bank (WB).
Although the WB had expressed
willingness to fund the project, Salazar said the ERC opted instead to request
for technical assistance.
He said the commission is targeting
to complete the project study in three to four months’ time from its planned
start in January this year.
The ERC chief also assured that the
agency has enough resources to fund the IT upgrade and the hiring of additional
people.
“We are going to double our budget.
We have money to spend for both the IT infrastructure and additional
consultants or technical people,” he said.
He said the ERC would not be
spending much on the hardware, adding that “what we will be procuring here will
be the software infrastructure.”
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