Alin Chitu, Ministry of Finance: “We want to use big data to improve fiscal controls”

“2021 was a big challenge for us, as the Ministry of Finance played an important role in the context of the PNRR negotiations. PNRR was built in a certain economic context, it was thought from the perspective of resilience amid the pandemic. We are now talking about other threats to the world and European economy. We want to consider these new objectives that we have assumed in the new context, namely military spending, when discussing financial discipline.

The objective of digitizing the fiscal administration started before the discussions with PNRR. The resources allocated through PNRR are welcome because we can accelerate the implementation of existing reform projects,” Alin Chitu, Secretary of State, Ministry of Finance said during Romania’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan Conference 2022 organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“We have built a plan to start collecting a very large amount of data so that at the end of the implementation of the reforms the burden of compliance will decrease, this element being often criticized in country reports.

At the ANAF level, the hardware and software elements that will allow the big data analysis will be purchased. Risk criteria have already been defined. We want to use this data as efficiently as possible so that we can direct the fiscal controls in the areas identified as risk areas following these analyzes. Big data analytics are difficult to develop, both in terms of material resources and in terms of developing the necessary administrative capacity.

From the perspective of the Ministry of Finance, we have a budget through which we can pay for the consultancy already contracted with the World Bank to have an analysis of the fiscal system and to adapt it to the current level of development of Romania. We have a budget that should allow us to implement micro-economic models through which to have very rapid impact studies when analyzing fiscal changes promoted by both the Ministry of Finance and Parliament and the social partners.

We have a digital component through which we want to create an automatic property valuation model that allows a better analysis of real estate owned by both the state and the private sector.”

Full recording of the conference here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5f1JNCEe-I&t=5504s