The recent proposal to reward Romanians who snitch on others' potential tax dodging was received with discontent both by the ruling coalition and the opposition. The Prime Minister Victor Ponta himself said that Liviu Voinea, the state secretary who expressed the idea publicly, should have thought several times before saying it. The opposition said asking Romanians to snitch on their neighbors' taxes is communist, Secret Police-like thinking.

Before the Revolution, we had political snitching, now the Ponta Government wants to invent fiscal snitching. If it wants to stop tax evasion, the Government should intervene in several very clear areas: trade with oil products, alcohol, tobacco, cereal trading. These are the priorities for Romania,” said Raluca Turcan, vice president of the Democratic Liberal Party (PDL).

The Prime Minister himself seemed to be against the idea. “I asked the state secretary Liviu Voinea – now that he is becoming a politician, as state secretary – to think several times before coming up with a project,” said the PM.

The new idea recently presented by Voinea is based on the informer system in Sweden, where people are encouraged and rewarded to give information on the wealth of their neighbors or companies. A similar system is applied in the US via the Internal Revenues Service, which offers a reward of 30 percent of the recovered amount.

Voinea will go to Sweden in two weeks to study the norms of applying the VAT payment upon cashing in bills, as well as the Swedish property tax system.

editor@romania-insider.com

photo source: sxc.hu