President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. has named lawyer and businessman Jose Arturo "Jay Art" Tugade as the new Assistant Secretary to head the Land Transportation Office.

After taking his oath of office before Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista earlier today, Tugade, in a statement, vowed to implement reforms within the agency and improve service delivery to the people.

"We are partners for progress, advocates of safety, and must be champions of excellence and efficiency. Foremost, we need to remember that we are in the service industry. Hence, we need to focus and improve the quality of our customer service to the public," he said.

As the new LTO chief, Tugade has likewise highlighted promoting intensified road safety campaigns as one of his top priorities. To do this, he committed to further strengthening the presence of LTO enforcers to properly implement transportation laws and traffic codes.

Aside from improving the quality of service delivery and promoting road safety, Tugade has committed to stamping out corruption within the LTO ranks. He pointed out that one way to address this is to limit human intervention in various agency transactions through digitalization.

"In order to address corruption, we will take steps to improve transparency and reduce, if not eliminate, human intervention. To this end, we shall exert all efforts to digitalize our agency," said the new LTO chief.

"What we can assure everyone is that I am an obedient soldier. I will perform and execute tasks assigned to me with passion and efficiency. I will work closely with Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista to ensure that the direction and marching order of the President to further develop transportation will be delivered," Tugade added.

Tugade is a prime mover in the transport and logistics service industry. He graduated with a Bachelor of Laws degree from San Beda College Manila in 2010. He spent his undergraduate years at the same school, where he graduated as valedictorian with a Bachelor of Arts and Science degree in Business Management and Entrepreneurship in 2003.

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