July 19 (SeeNews) - The new chief of Romania's fiscal authority ANAF, Mirela Calugareanu, vowed on Wednesday to make all necessary efforts to help keep the country's budget deficit below 3%.
"Together with the finance ministry we will take all the necessary steps to meet our deficit target of 3%. We will also pay more attention to the tax agency-taxpayer relationship in order to stimulate voluntary compliance and to increase their confidence in the tax institution," Calugareanu said in a statement on her first day at the helm of ANAF.
Romania targets a consolidated budget gap equivalent to 2.99% of GDP on a cash basis in 2017, just below the EU's 3% ceiling. According to the EU's Maastricht treaty signed in 1992, the ratio of the annual general government deficit relative to GDP at market prices must not exceed 3% at the end of the preceding fiscal year.
Romania's consolidated budget deficit widened to 0.27% of the projected 2017 GDP in the first five months of the year, up from 0.10% of GDP a year earlier.
In May, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that Romania's budget deficit is expected to widen to 3.7% of GDP this year and to 3.9% of GDP in 2018 in the absence of additional fiscal measures.
The new objectives set by ANAF's new leadership are to streamline collection of budget revenues, to recover the unspent sums to the budget and to meet the budget revenue targets set for this year.
On Tuesday, prime minister Mihai Tudose replaced the head ANAF, Bogdan Stan, with Mirela Calugareanu.
Calugareanu, a former head of ANAF's general directorate for tax collection, has extensive experience in tax matters gained in more than 26 years, both in public revenue collection and public administration in general.
Stan's dismissal came after both former prime minister Sorin Grindeanu and Mihai Tudose publicly expressed dissatisfaction with ANAF's performance in tax collection.
In June, ANAF responded to the accusations of poor efficiency, saying that tax collection has increased 4.5% on the year in the first six months of 2017, reaching 101.6 billion lei ($26 billion/22 billion euro).
Bogdan Stan was appointed as head of ANAF in January this year after his predecessor Dragos Doros resigned.
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