Economic operators no longer have the obligation to declare to the fiscal bodies the commercial and commission additions-brief comment regarding the changes brought by the Law no. 222/2020
Law no. 222/2020 adopted on October 30 2020 is a legislative act whose main grounds are the elimination of bureucracy regarding commercial addition, therefore is hereby repealed the Law no. 12/1990 concerning the protection of the population against some production, trade activities or provision of illicit services and, as well, adds and modifies two articles from O.G no. 21/ 1992 concerning consumer protection.
The aim of this legislative act was to eliminate the obligation of economic operators to declare to the fiscal bodies the commercial and comission additions applied whereas it was an unnecessary form of bureaucracy that led to the penalization of the operators by the application of fines, although there wasn’t no prejudice or an injury of interest. It was found that art. 1 point f) of the Law 12/1990 (the norm regarding the declaration of the addition) has survived since Romania’s transition period from the Socialist economy to a market economy, back when the state still controlled the price formation, and the commercial addition was an important element concerning the prices formation in that transitional regime and that, currently, can’t no longer be applied due to the fact that traders are no longer required to have a certain maximum addition level, whereas are free to determine the prices at any level would correspond to market’s supply and demand.
Taking into account that could be declared any level of commercial addition, that this concept was no longer necessary in setting prices in the current market economy and that there wasn’t any standard form for this declaration, but, most importantly, the fact that led to the application of undue fines from the supervisory authority, the abrogation of this obligation was welcome.
A part of the obligations that were referred by art.1 from the Law 12/1990 proved to be provided in the subsequent normative acts, so that the reason for their abrogation is the avoidance of a legal parallelism.
On the other hand, the obligations that were referred to in art.1 points a) and e) from the former normative document, respectively, the obligation of perform production, trade activities or provision of services, where necessary, with the accomplishment of the established conditions by law and the obligation to ensure that the trades are accompanied by the papers of provenance, no matter where they are, have been reformulated and added to the O.G content no.21/1992 in art.4 in the form of a new paragraph.
With regard to the impact of this legislative change on the business environment, we believe that this can only be a positive one, given the fact that the obligation of traders to submit the statement of commercial addition, that, through non-compliance, in the last few years, has drown a considerable number of fines (in 2019, 49 fines were imposed, in the amount of 870.000 lei). Ultimately, the statement proved to be completely useless given the economic and social context in which we find ourselves. Furthermore, the abrogation of some obligations already referred to in other normative documents, will have, also, a positive impact on the Romanian legislation, being appreciated the initiative to repeal some obsolete or left without applicability provisions.
Author: IONELA-MAGDALENA IACOBAN , practitioner student
Faculty of Law, University of Bucharest