Fiscal Changes Make Romanian Entrepreneurs Fear Bankruptcy

Small businesses in Romania that don't have enough cash to pay taxes and social welfare contributions on time could either cut their employees' wages or shut down altogether because of a deluge of fiscal changes and general political uncertainty, small business owners say.

Entrepreneurs have been warning that over 290 changes in the fiscal code in just a year - including the imposition of new taxes - have caused confusion; they also accuse the government of acting unpredictably.

In one example, a pair of Canadians who opened a restaurant in Cluj Napoca in 2014 decided to close it at the start of this year because they could not afford to pay new taxes that the authorities have imposed.

"Unfortunately, the fiscal changes introduced by the national government last year have made things increasingly difficult for us, and the latest changes that came into effect as of January 1, 2018 have simply made it impossible to continue," they wrote on the restaurant's Facebook page.

Other business owners feel that the government is not sensitive to the difficulties of running a company.

"It is very clear to me that the purpose of all these changes was to make it impossible for small businesses to pay even one cent to an employee without declaring it," Valeriu Popescu, the owner of a small constructions consultancy, told BIRN.

"In principle, that is absolutely legitimate, but in practice it's bound to kill many small companies, especially commercial ones that survived by paying employees as part-timers," he added.

Popescu said that smaller companies suffer because bigger firms do not pay them on time for contract work, and that it is very difficult for small and medium businesses to survive in Romania and pay their taxes on time.

...