Speaking at a Bucharest Stock Exchange event, Romania's finance minister Marcel Bolos confirmed that the 4.4%-of-GDP deficit target this year is out of the question (maybe 5.5%).

He has surprisingly implied that the revenues and even the expenditures are out of his ministry's control and finally promised to come up within 30 days with a package of measures "to strengthen the institutional capacity" of the tax collection agency ANAF, primarily regarding fighting tax evasion.

The new package of reforms will focus on the large taxpayers, he implied.

"There are 3,373 large taxpayers who bring RON 15 billion (EUR 3 billion) to the state budget every month (over 10% of GDP annually). We want the activity here to be much more efficient from the perspective of collecting state budget resources," minister Bolos said, quoted by Financialintelligence.ro.

Bolos also accused unexpected developments in the areas of energy subsidies and public debt service.

"Let's see how the budget execution evolves and the pace of expenditure and revenue. I assure you that, at the Ministry of Finance, only expenses that are strictly necessary are incurred," he said.

He also said that the social security contributions are not collected at the expected pace.

iulian@romania-insider.com

(Photo source: Gov.ro)