The Minister of Business, Trade and Entrepreneurship, Florin Jianu submitted for examination in the Government meeting on Thursday, the principles and operation mechanism for a draft of a future Law of prevention.
The aim of this initiative is to force control authorities to first educate and train the entrepreneurs, to prevent mistakes and only then to apply penalties.
These principles have been defined for the first time in the summer of 2016 when, during the modernization process of ANAF, the head of this institution and officials from the Ministry of Finance emphasized the role of „advisor” that ANAF should also assume in relation to the business environment.
Principles of future Laws of prevention
According to a press release by the Ministry, following the entry into force of the Law of prevention, a company can no longer be penalized unless it has been previously advised and warned on its mistakes.
The operational mechanism will be:
- The inspector cannot apply the civil penalty at the first finding of facts representing the contravention;
- They will conclude an inspection report with the irregularities identified and draft the compliance plan including the aspects that need to be addressed and the deadline for compliance for each offense;
- The deadline for compliance cannot be shorter than 7 days;
- After the deadline, the inspector has the right to resume the control;
- If they found that the requirements of the compliance plan were not met, within the deadline, the inspector apply the penalties provided by the legislation;
The taxpayer benefits from the preventive measures once for each act representing an offense within a period of 5 years.
The future Law of prevention will apply to penalties provided by:
- Tax Code
- Tax Procedure Code
- The Law of safety and health at work
- Labour Code
- Law of the unemployment insurance system and stimulating employment
- Accounting Law
- Social Dialogue Law
- Law of SME establishment and development
- Law of occasional work of daily labourers
- Law of apprenticeship at work
- Government decision on the general register of employees
These areas, assures the Ministry, will be extended during the inter-ministerial consultation process with new laws for which the Law of prevention will be applied.
The draft also contains exceptions from law enforcement in cases where:
- There is a danger in identifying the tax situation;
- There is a serious and immediate threat of injury to employees;
- Undeclared work or work of minors is used
The Law of prevention does not apply, for instance, in case of the penalties for undeclared work, namely for using the work of up to 5 persons without concluding an individual employment contract, in which case the penalty is a fine of 10,000 to 20,000 lei for each person identified. In this case, the prevention system will not be accepted because that would lead to encouraging the undeclared work, by not sanctioning this act.
The estimated time for drafting the final form of the bill, the approval of the Ministry and adoption in the Government meeting is 23 February 2017.
