Romania will start the financial information exchange system in September 2017, Mihaela Mitroi, PwC Romania Tax and Legal Services Leader, told a specialist conference on Tuesday.
“We encourage communication among us, consultants, your representatives, and the tax authorities. Voluntary compliance is a project dear to us and I believe in it.In Romania, the financial information exchange system will start in September 2017. Information will be exchanged for company accounts with over $250 million and for individual accounts with over $1 million. As far as voluntary compliance is concerned, only three EU countries don’t have such programs, all the rest have implemented this system,” Mitroi said.
In Romania, the National Tax Administration Agency’s Individual Income Control General Directorate conducts checks with expert auditing teams that include a total of 120 persons.
According to PwC Romania data, in 2011, 11 individuals with high incomes / wealth have been checked and in 2015 checks were subsequently expanded to high-risk individuals, with a target group of 5,400 people, of whom 313 have been selected.
2017 is the last year of voluntary compliance, as the automatic financial information exchange system will become operational, that can track undeclared taxable sources.
In 2015, the European Union signed the agreement on the automatic exchange of financial account information with Switzerland, Liechtenstein, San Marino, under which 96 jurisdictions including Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Guernsey, Jersey, Gibraltar, Seychelles, Bahamas, Belize, Hong Kong, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Switzerland, San Marino committed to the automatic information exchange.
Romania has so far signed financial information exchange treaties with some 74 states.
The government approved in February 2016 a bill to ratify the Multi-Annual Competent Authority Agreement on the Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information. Under the agreement Romania is allowed to exchange information to identify individuals or legal entities that circumvent tax payments by transferring money to foreign accounts.
The exchange will include, inter alia, information for identifying the person – name, address, fiscal identification code, information on the account number, the name and identification number of the reporting financial institution, information about the amount in the account, and in the case of a custodian account, information on the gross interest, dividends or other incomes for the assets in the account or the gross amount of proceeds from the sale or buyback of financial assets.
