Last updated: 3 November 2016
Government Ordinance no. 22/2016, published in Official Journal no. 658 of the 29th August 2016, has recently amended Emergency Ordinance no. 77/1999 on measures to prevent inability to pay.
Thus, Government Ordinance no. 22/2016 establishes a new obligation for legal entities, whose purpose is helping them avoid financial losses caused by non-payment of invoices on maturity. Hereinafter you can find a brief presentation of such changes.
AN OBLIGATION FOR COMPANIES
In accordance with the regulations in force, legal persons – irrespective of their form of organization – are required keep record of the receivables they have against their debtors and of the debts they have towards their creditors.
After the entry into force of Government Ordinance no. 22/2016, companies will be required to keep record of the amounts outstanding for more than 30 days from the date of the invoice or from the due date (if such date is clearly specified), both for debts and for receivables, if the value thereof exceeds 10.000 Lei. If they fail to comply with this obligation, companies risk a fine up to 5.000 Lei.
If the company is a debtor, the abovementioned record must include:
- elements that help prove the capacity as debtor
- name, registered office and tax code
- creditor’s name, registered office and tax code
If the company is a creditor, it will provide the following information:
This record must be sent by e-mail to an address to be communicated by the Ministry of Economy. Any potential debts between companies will then be compensated by a specialized entity. Furthermore, the record needs to be updated in less than one business day from the date of occurrence of any change.
DEBT COMPENSATION
Debt compensation will be performed by a specialized entity and it will allow the compensation of debts exceeding 10,000 Lei that remain unpaid for more than 30 days by precisely identifying the debts entities have towards each other.
The purpose of the compensation mechanism is to simplify compensation between entities that have debts towards each other: for example, A is the debtor of B, which is, at its turn, debtor of C and the latter is debtor of A. This mechanism allows compensation between the three creditors.
The services in charge of compensation operations issues a compensation order, which is used by the companies to record debt pay-off in their own accounting books.
Please note that the new OG 22/2016 no longer provides the transmission of information only for receivables/debts exceeding 10,000 Lei. Nevertheless, the note describing the Ordinance specifies that the 10,000 Lei threshold should be kept and it is very likely that the threshold be mentioned in the implementing norms, which should have been passed by the end of September.
We hope you found this information useful!