Romanian Parliament commission holds first paperless meeting, aims to introduce tablets for all commission meetings

The Romanian Parliament is slowly heading for paperless practices, and for the first time, the 20 members of the Permanent Office in the Chamber of Deputies have had a paperless meeting this week. They all received tablets, which came for free after the Parliament prolonged the contract with the company that had won the bid for mobile telephony, according to Valeriu Zgonea, President of the Chamber. Zgonea hopes to expand this electronic type of meeting in all the permanent commissions and in the departments of the Chamber of Deputies. The tablets had been at the Chamber of Deputies for several months, and using them instead of paper in just 2 to 3 commissions would save the Parliament some RON 70,000 – or around EUR 15,000. Last year, the Permanent Office had to make 700,000 paper copies for its internal meetings, and each member of the commission usually stores the paper in their own office, and after a while probably throws them away, according to Zgonea. His aim is for the Permanent Office meetings to be live, all deputies to have tablets in time, and stop having people passing papers from one side of of the Parliament to the other. A 2011 analysis by PwC found that the Romanian Parliament could save some EUR 97,000 a year by using less paper, while using using exclusively economic equipment for printing and copying (dedicated centers), could lead to cost savings of up to EUR 232,000 per year (approximately 30 percent of the yearly expenditure for printing and copying documents). editor@romania-insider.com (photo source: Valeriu Zgonea's Facebook page)