Romania’s government approves prevention draft bill for business environment

The Romanian government has approved on Thursday the prevention draft bill, which aims to improve dramatically the relation between the public authorities and the companies.

In short, the draft bill which has been submitted to Parliament for approval, states that inspectors can’t fine businesses for a series of issues that don’t have a high social risk.

The list of 267 offences apply in the fiscal field, but also on labor, agriculture, tourism, waters and forests, environment protection, communications, education, consumer protection, local administration and internal affairs. Once state workers find one of the issues on the list, they are obliged to issue a warning and tell the business to fix what’s wrong in up to three months. If the business owners don’t solve the problems, then they will be sanctioned.

Under the current legislation, inspectors can fine businesses immediately.

A business can benefit from the prevention mechanism once for each contravention identified by authorities, up to 3 years since the warning has been issued.

“The prevention law represents a new stage in the strategy for improving the relation of the state with the business environment. During the extended consultations process we discovered that aside from the radicalization of the relation between the business environment and the control institutions, there is an ongoing issue with draft bills, which are not harmonized, which issue fines in several fields,” said the minister for business environment, Alexandru Petrescu. He explained that the government will move next to remove overlapping regulation between ministries.