Romania's tax agency spends EUR 13 mln on consultancy

Romania’s tax agency ANAF hasn’t spent any money on upgrading its IT system as part of its ongoing development program financed by the World Bank. All the money spent so far in this program went on consultancy, finance minister Ionut Misa said during hearings in the Senate’s economic committee on Tuesday. “Unfortunately, some 23.5% of this program has been implemented, meaning that 23.5% of the allotted sums have been spent, but no money went into the IT system. All the money, the equivalent of RON 60 million, was spent only on consultancy,” Misa said, according to local Agerpres. He added that each year, starting 2012, the World Bank’s representatives pointed out that the IT system hasn’t been improved at all. The minister also said he talked to World Bank representatives and agreed to create the National Center for Fiscal Information, a project aimed at centralizing all of ANAF’s data bases and put the tax agency’s IT systems under the same structure. “There were 322 distinct data bases, many of them made in different programming languages, so it was necessary to unify the whole IT system under a single umbrella,” Misa said, adding that ANAF’s hardware was also outdated, as no new investments have been made since 2005. editor@romania-insider.com