Romania's tax administration to take the modern communication route: text messages to taxpayers, and smartphone apps

The Romanian tax administration plans to upgrade communication with taxpayers and, instead of sending documents via post, they plan to send text messages. In the future, taxpayers who mention their phone numbers in the forms submitted to the tax administration ANAF could receive SMS notifications, according to Romanian daily Gandul. Smartphone applications for taxpayers are also part of the plan, in order to more easily send reminders about due taxes, due dates or forms due for submitting. The ANAF plans to increase the ratio of taxpayers who declare by themselves their revenues, up to 92 percent in 2017, as well as the ratio of those who voluntary pay their dues, according to Gandul. ANAF will modernize over the next five years thanks to a EUR 77 million budget, most of which will come from the World Bank. With a low tax collection rate and a 33 percent ratio of budget revenues out of the country’s GDP, Romania needs to reduce tax evasion and reorganize its tax administration offices. Around three quarters of the money will be spent on IT systems, which should help with simplifying ANAF’s structure. A similar modernization project was undertaken by Bulgaria, also with the help of the World Bank. Given a timeframe similar to Romania’s proposed scheme, Burgaria’s modernization saw cuts in regional tax administration offices and resulted in an increase of 6 percentage points of the GDP in the tax collection. The program was set to start in October 2013 and by 2016, ANAF’s territorial structure should be reorganized, with staff from redundant areas moving to regions with staff shortages. Its IT&C system should already be modernized by 2016, while its activity processed re-arranged. editor@romania-insider.com