Romania committed to digitalizing 36 public services by 2025, minister says

Romania's minister of research, Bogdan Ivan, recently stated that the Government has committed to digitalizing 36 public services by the end of 2025. He added that seventeen are already included in the public services hub presented at the National Trade Register Office on Thursday.

The minister specified that they include starting a business, checking a company name reservation, establishing legal entities, individual enterprises, or PFA (Authorized Natural Person), liquidation, dissolution, deregistration, company insolvency, providing information, issuing certificates, and other reports.

The public services hub is an "extremely important progress in terms of public services offered to citizens in digital format,” Ivan said, cited by News.ro. “It represents a very good practice model for the upcoming digital transformation of the Romanian state," he added.

The minister also emphasized that the new project follows the principle of interoperability. “Once a public service is created, it will be interconnectable with other services and interfaces of the Romanian state and will be able to collect data from multiple databases. Currently, we can say that the time required to create a company was reduced from 72 to 24 hours. The portal can be accessed 24/7. The time to complete all documentation and upload it for setting up a company with a single associate is approximately 15 minutes,” the official explained.

The new digital infrastructure will help 2 million Romanian entrepreneurs, according to the minister. Submitting requests will be done 100% online.

Additionally, the Ministry of Digitalization is currently in discussions with officials from Meta, TikTok, and Google about extending the mechanism for reporting and quickly removing deepfake content reported on the institution's website beyond the electoral period.

"From informal discussions, Romania is among the top three countries in Europe regarding online scam schemes," stated the minister of Digitalization, Bogdan Ivan, cited by Profit.ro.

Earlier this year, before the local and European elections that took place on June 9, the Ministry of Digitalization launched a dedicated #nofake page where citizens can report deepfake content they find malicious or misleading on various social media platforms and search engines. A team from the ministry then transmits the content validated as illegal or misleading to Meta, Google, and TikTok through dedicated channels. The ministry is now looking to prolong the mechanism beyond the electoral period.