Anti-fraud doesn’t seem to want to understand what transfer pricing is, especially after it has been given new “powers”, ie it can issue tax rulings. The former head of ANAF Dragoš Dorosh, currently the head of fiscal doctrine – KPMG Romania, told what he encountered in practice and how the tax service works in Denmark.

“When I was in office, I went to a conference and spoke to a gentleman from Denmark. He said that they, as a tax office, have completed the declaration of income or income and expenses for 90% of legal entities and 70% for individuals,” he told the TaxEU Forum.

• “Previously, they were sent this way to taxpayers who supplemented or made comments. They used this database, they knew so much and they could afford this work.”

“What is happening in our practice? It pains me that Antifrauda can issue tax rulings based on a 3-page transfer pricing analysis in two days. Such efficiency … who has seen this before?” said Dorosh

• It is good that we are in a hurry and we are doing inspections more qualitatively and efficiently, but they should be done professionally.

“I insisted on only one thing with those gentlemen from the control group: let’s go to background control. Let’s take a look at what transfer pricing means. It didn’t really work,” said the former ANAF chief.

“Perhaps, in a sense, it is better to say that before it gets better, it has to get worse,” referring to Lucian Heyusch’s statement about how digitization will change ANAF (or rather, Big Data) in how audits will be done.

“This measure by which Antifraud can issue tax rulings is a mistake,” Doros said.

In theory it might be better, in practice we might be dead by then.

“The process itself, until ANAF succeeds in doing what it said, is related to infrastructure, which is only at the beginning. What we are seeing now in PNRR is that they have committed to increasing control by 10%. So… theory versus practice. Theoretically, we will probably see the dawn at the end of 2025,” Dorosh said.

Dan Manolescu, president of the Chamber of Fiscal Advisers, chimed in, saying “in theory it might be better, in practice we might be dead by then.”

For his part, lawyer Gabriel Birish, a former secretary of state at the Ministry of Finance, said that “we all like to dream that we will achieve remote control, big data, the beautiful. It’s good not to become dreamers, because then the world will take us for fools.”

• We had RAMP: the project was simply thwarted by the then leadership of the Ministry of Finance.

“Speaking of data collection: AMEF. This obliged all taxpayers in Romania. The goal was not just to have more cash registers and get taxpayers to put a few hundred million more into the pockets of the suppliers of the new equipment. The aim was for this equipment to be able to transmit real-time data to ANAF, leaving aside the fact that the solution was technically outdated when it was regulated in Romania,” he added.

• The CNIF (department of the Ministry of Finance no.) managed to make the investment to obtain this data, which was available all the time, only until 2022.

“Now they are accepted, but not processed. Let’s be realistic. There is a big risk that the same people who blocked the digitization of the tax administration in the past will do it now,” Gabriel Birish also stated.

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