The inspection has ended. The inspector informs you of a loss of EUR 700,000 and explains, almost collegially, that you have 30 days to pay “so that no criminal file is opened”. You do not receive a tax assessment decision (decizie de impunere). You do not receive a calculation you can check. You receive a figure, a deadline and a promise: if you pay the amount increased by 15%, plus interest and penalties, the conduct is not punished. You have 30 days to make one of the hardest decisions of your life as an entrepreneur. And once you make it, there is no going back.
The mechanism was introduced by Law No. 126/2024 (Official Gazette No. 437 of 13 May 2024, in force from 16 May 2024), which rewrote Article 10 of Law No. 241/2005. Article 10 sets out a tiered system, in which the benefit shrinks as the case advances, and the price of payment rises.
All versions apply exclusively to the offences under Article 6¹, Article 8 and Article 9 of Law No. 241/2005: withholding and failing to pay over taxes collected at source, unlawfully obtaining funds or reimbursements, and tax evasion proper. The other offences in the law (Articles 3 to 5 and Article 7) remain outside this mechanism.
Article 10(1): if, by the expiry of a maximum 30 day period from the end of the inspection that establishes a loss of up to EUR 1,000,000, the loss, increased by 15%, plus interest and penalties, is covered in full by actual payment, the conduct is not punished. In that case, the competent authorities do not refer the matter to the criminal investigation bodies.
Article 10(3), for losses of up to EUR 1,000,000: during the criminal investigation, an increase of 25%; in the pre-trial chamber (camera preliminară) or at trial, until the first-instance judgment, 50%; on appeal, until the final judgment, 100%. In all three cases, the outcome is based on Article 16(1)(h) of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
Article 10(2), with no cap and no increase: the loss covered in full before the first hearing date → the sentencing limits are halved (and if the loss recovered this way does not exceed EUR 1,000,000, a fine may be applied instead); after the first hearing date and until the final judgment → a reduction of one third.
Note the four cumulative elements of the first door: the threshold (up to EUR 1,000,000, above it, the door is closed); the amount (the debt plus 15% plus interest plus penalties, not the debt alone); the deadline (a maximum of 30 days from the end of the inspection, not “before the first hearing date”, a frequent confusion that stems from paragraph (2)); and actual payment (not set-off, not instalments, not a payment undertaking, a transfer actually received).
Who pays? The law uses a passive formulation, the loss “is covered in full, by actual payment”, without saying who must pay it. The person under investigation, the company, an associate, a relative or a third party may all pay. Moreover, Article 10(4) provides that “the provisions of this article apply to all defendants even if they did not contribute to covering the loss referred to in paragraphs (1) and (2)”. If one of them pays, the benefit extends to all of them. Note the drafting, however: the text refers to the loss referred to in paragraphs (1) and (2), without mentioning paragraph (3), so the extension of the benefit to the 25%-50%-100% scale does not follow expressly from the text.
One filter applies across the board: Article 10(6) excludes the benefits under paragraphs (1) and (2) if the offender has committed another offence under the same law within 5 years of committing the offence for which they previously benefited from these provisions. The benefit is not repeatable indefinitely. Thresholds and sentencing limits are covered separately.
This is, in my view, the most important gain for the defence in recent years.
Article 10(2) provides, in its final sentence, that “the loss will be determined on the basis of a specialist expert report”, that “the suspect or defendant has the right to take part in preparing the expert report”, that Articles 172 to 180 of the Code of Criminal Procedure apply accordingly, and that the suspect or defendant, whether an individual or a legal person acting through a representative, will be notified of the expert report being ordered, “giving them the time needed to fully exercise their procedural rights”.
By Decision No. 430/2025, delivered on 15 December 2025 by the panel for resolving points of law in criminal matters and published in the Official Gazette No. 149 of 26 February 2026, the High Court of Cassation and Justice (ÎCCJ) held that, “in interpreting Article 10 of Law No. 241/2005, as amended by Law No. 126/2024, the failure to prepare the specialist expert report renders the act referring the case to the court irregular, which results in the case being sent back to the prosecutor”.
The practical consequence is considerable: the loss stated in the indictment (rechizitoriu) can no longer be a simple figure copied from the tax inspection report. And the party-appointed expert report is no longer a luxury, it is the central tool of the case. Between the figure from ANAF (Romania's national tax administration) and the figure that results once time-barred amounts, deductible VAT rejected on formal grounds, and reclassified transactions are stripped out, there is usually a difference that moves the case from one threshold category into another. How huge figures appear after an inspection is covered separately.
WARNING, paying pre-emptively is the most serious mistake in practice. Made in a panic, before the loss has been correctly established. The figure communicated at the end of the inspection is a claim, not a judicial truth. If you pay EUR 700,000 increased by 15% for an actual loss of EUR 200,000, you will have overpaid roughly EUR 575,000 that you will not get back, because there will no longer be any judicial body left to find that it was not owed. The 30 day deadline is short precisely because the pressure is part of the mechanism. Use it to obtain the calculation, not to sign a payment order.
This is the heart of the decision and deserves honest treatment. The critical argument was put most clearly by lawyers Emanuel Bondalici and Cătălin Chibzui (Reff & Asociații | Deloitte Legal), in an August 2024 analysis that has remained the reference on the subject: the ground for non-punishment under paragraph (1) is a “poisoned apple”.
The Antifraud report (procesul-verbal) states the amount of the loss, but it is not a tax assessment decision. As it is not an administrative tax act, it cannot be challenged under Article 268 et seq. of the Tax Procedure Code. You pay without having anything to appeal.
A guilty plea agreement under the Code of Criminal Procedure requires sufficient evidence, mandatory legal assistance and confirmation of its lawfulness by the court. Here, none of that applies: the admission is made before inspectors who are not judges.
The Tax Procedure Code generally allows amounts from a referral report to be paid and then recovered later if the criminal authorities find they were not owed. Here, by definition, the criminal authorities never rule on the matter at all.
The implicit admission can be relied on in later inspections as evidence of unlawful tax conduct.
The counter-argument, just as real: a criminal tax evasion case means years of proceedings, a seizure on accounts and property, judicial control, defence costs running into the tens of thousands of euros, blocked financing and, often, the loss of the business before any judgment at all. For an entrepreneur with a loss figure that is disputable but not clearly unlawful, the 15% may be the cheapest thing they ever buy. Both perspectives are legitimate. The choice depends on one thing alone: how solid the ANAF figure is. And that is established through a technical analysis, not in a conversation at the end of the inspection. The parallel tax front, challenging the tax assessment decision, is coordinated with the criminal one.
There is also a legislative design problem worth knowing about: the tax authority's duty to refer matters to the criminal authorities immediately, laid down in the Tax Procedure Code, sits in tension with the 30 day “grace period” assumed by Article 10(1). If the inspection activity ends at the moment of referral, the condition of “the end of the inspection that establishes a loss” risks not being met. This procedural deadlock has been flagged since 2024, and in practice it translates into inconsistent application from one tax authority office to another. The point at which an inspection becomes a criminal case is covered separately.
This is the system's harshest contradiction, and I encounter it constantly. In tax evasion cases, taking precautionary measures is mandatory (Article 11 of Law No. 241/2005). The seizure typically falls precisely on bank accounts. And you cannot pay, from frozen accounts, the loss that would bring you non-punishment.
The result: the state freezes the very asset you could use to make good the loss that the freeze is meant to secure. There is no automatic way out, it has to be requested. What you ask the prosecutor or, as the case may be, the judge for is a partial lifting of the seizure for a specific purpose: releasing the exact sum, transferred directly to the state budget. The argument is unanswerable in logic, but it needs a written, reasoned application filed within the 30 days. The mechanics are covered in the article on precautionary measures.
The civil claim. Non-punishment is not acquittal. Once the loss has been covered in full by actual payment, the civil claim is left without an object, the state, through ANAF, has nothing left to claim. But payment does not erase the conduct, does not amount to rehabilitation, and does not prevent the same facts being relied on in other proceedings (tax, insolvency, director liability).
Cases predating May 2024. Article 5 of the Criminal Code applies: the more favourable criminal law. The analysis is trickier than it looks: Law No. 126/2024 was simultaneously more favourable (the threshold for the ground for non-punishment rose from EUR 100,000 to EUR 1,000,000) and harsher (the sentencing limits under Article 9(1) rose from 2 to 8 years to 3 to 10 years). Which law is more favourable is determined as a whole, not by combining the two laws into a “lex tertia”. For conduct committed before 16 May 2024 and not finally adjudicated, the analysis is done on the actual figures, case by case.
The criticism is well known: raising the threshold to EUR 1,000,000 turns tax evasion into a priced offence, in which a 15% increase buys impunity. The argument carries moral weight and has also been made in the business press, which noted the electoral context in which the law was adopted in May 2024.
The opposite reading starts from a budgetary reality: through convictions, the state was recovering only a minor fraction of the losses involved. Prison does not bring money into the budget; payment does. The explanatory memorandum openly assumes a shift in the law's objective, away from punishment and towards repairing the loss. And at the same time, the same law toughened the penalties for those who do not pay.
I do not set out to settle the debate. I flag it because, for whoever receives the figure at the end of the inspection, it has a concrete consequence: the mechanism is contested, its application is inconsistent, and the practice will keep changing. The pressure now comes from the opposite direction too: in 2026, more than a hundred prosecutors publicly called for the law to be amended, arguing that the now-mandatory expert report is holding up investigations. The ground is not settled, which is one more reason to decide on the facts of the actual case, not on newspaper headlines.
Not absolutely. Article 10(1) provides that the tax authorities do not refer the matter to the criminal investigation bodies, but the prosecutor can open a case of their own motion, from another source (a denunciation, a related file, a check on business partners). In that case, the file will be discontinued under Article 16(1)(h) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, as a result of the ground for non-punishment, but you will still have gone through a criminal investigation. The benefit of paying is diluted, not eliminated.
The law does not require the payment to come from any particular person; it only requires that the loss be covered in full, by actual payment. In practice, payment out of the company's assets is common and accepted. Be careful, however, about the tax treatment of the amount in the company's accounting and about the consequences in your relationship with the other shareholders, matters that should be prepared before payment, not after.
The ground for non-punishment is raised before the court, which will, if the conditions are met, deliver a decision based on Article 16(1)(h) of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The key is proof of actual payment and falling within the applicable deadline. If you have missed a procedural threshold, for example, you paid after the first hearing date without the corresponding increase, the outcome may be a reduced sentence rather than non-punishment. Accurately documenting the date and the amount of the payment is essential.
The first decision is not whether to pay, but what to pay. Request the detailed calculation in writing, check for tax-barred periods, and commission your own technical analysis. If the result largely confirms the figure, paying within the short deadline is worth discussing seriously. If it disproves it, refusing to pay and challenging it is the right path, and High Court Decision No. 430/2025 gives you a real tool: without the specialist expert report, the indictment is vulnerable.
Informative material, updated on 18 July 2026. It does not constitute legal or tax advice; individual situations must be assessed on their own facts. The presumption of innocence applies until a final judgment.
If the matter involves a criminal complaint or an open file, the related analyses are grouped under economic criminal law. For how the defence is built, see tax evasion defence.
Time limits run from the date of communication. A first conversation clarifies what is being alleged, what you need to substantiate and how the defence is built, before an estimate becomes a tax assessment decision.