The Exchequer relies on substantial support from banks for collecting its debts from the taxpayers failing to pay their obligations to the budget, as of next year.
The Fiscal procedure code to be endorsed by the Government will “bind” commercial banks to provide the Exchequer with information on the accounts of the “troublemaking” clients.
The rather general provisions in the normative act, however, risk breaching the banking secret principle. For this reason precisely, the Finance Ministry and the National Bank of Romania are preparing a joint order draft on establishing a bank account file, which should include all the info on the accounts of a specific taxpayer to be forwarded to the Exchequer.
Constantin Mihail, head of the Revenue Management Department with the Finance Ministry said the ministry officials were currently in talks with the Romanian Banking Association representatives in an attempt to set a procedure that should allow freezing all bank accounts of a specific taxpayer as soon as one account of that taxpayer was blocked. There will be certain exceptions, however, such as the money used for paying foreign loans with fixed maturity, for instance.
NBR Governor Mugur Isarescu’s adviser, Adrian Vasilescu, would not comment on the information.
“We are actually talking about something already regulated by the law. These are the consequences of Ordinance 61, later turned into a law, which we bankers quite fiercely challenged, when it was first issued. However, I may say that we have reached an agreement with the Public Finance Ministry so that banks are now bound to provide only nominal information about bank accounts, without specifying the value of the accounts in question. We then report to them until the 15th of every month and notify them whether any changes have occurred with respect to those accounts, whether a specific person has opened a new account or is closing one,” said Bogdan Baltazar, vice-president of the Romanian Banking Association.
The Fiscal procedure code that stipulates banks are bound to assist the Finance Ministry in collecting budgetary debts has to enforce on January 2004, along with the Fiscal Code. The two normative act drafts are already behind schedule, considering the parliamentary debate might take longer than planned.
The procedure code stipulates, besides the obligation of the banks, that if necessary, the already existing amounts in the ROL and foreign currency accounts of a specific taxpayer, as well as those to reach the accounts in form of daily revenues, shall be frozen for paying the debt to the State.
In addition, the taxpayers failing to pay their fiscal debts in due time will be charged an interest set by Government Decision as proposed by the Finance Ministry and taking into account the benchmark interest of the NBR. The interest is set once a year, in December, and remains valid for the entire next year, or at some point through the year in case NBR’s interest changes by more than 5%. oana.nuta@zf.ro