Romania’s tax collection agency ANAF will begin on July 1 “massive checks” to verify the income of individuals suspected of tax evasion, the agency’s chief Lucian Ovidiu Heiuş, announced.

He explained that an analysis showed that 561,000 people had accumulated undeclared revenues of EUR 20 bln (EUR 100 bln) over four years (2016-2019) - meaning EUR 8,900 per individual per year.

However, Heiuş admits that the agency’s move is rather aimed at persuading the 561,000 to declare their revenues, since only 1,000 of them will actually be investigated in the first year, with plans to increase the number of investigations to 3,000 in the coming years, Profit.ro reported.

Even at a rate of 5,000 per year, ANAF will need over 100 years to check only the suspects spotted for the years 2016-2019.

When it was set up in 2015, the department (the General Directorate for Personal Income Control) was supposed to investigate the high-earning individuals and was designed to employ 100 - but only 44 positions have been filed so far.

In 2019, the Directorate checked a record number of people; for the first half of 2020, the number of those reviewed decreased significantly, as did the identified undeclared income.

As of June 2020, there were only 61 inspections completed. The additional revenues identified after the 61 inspections were RON 50.7 mln.

In 2019, for the whole year, however, the number of checks stood at 237, and the additional undeclared revenues were RON 236.9 mln - still far from the billions announced by ANAF’s head Heiuş.

(Photo: LCVA | Dreamstime.com)

andrei@romania-insider.com