The most cost-effective tax service a company can buy is not defending a dispute but avoiding it. An inspection file that ends with a tax assessment decision (decizie de impunere) of hundreds of thousands of lei costs tens of times more than an independent analysis commissioned in good time would have cost. It is the difference between repairing the roof in fair weather and repairing it during the storm, with the water already inside the house.
The preventive tax audit is an independent tax analysis of a taxpayer's transactions, treatments and returns, carried out outside any inspection or litigation framework, to identify, classify and correct tax risks before they become the subject of an inspection. In technical terms, it is a form of extrajudicial tax expert report (expertiză fiscală extrajudiciară), a concept expressly defined by the Rules on the preparation of judicial and extrajudicial tax expert reports by tax advisers, approved by Hotărârea Camerei Consultanților Fiscali nr. 2/2026 (in force from 11 February 2026), as a specialist assessment carried out outside a jurisdictional framework, at the request of an individual or a legal person.
Unlike ordinary bookkeeping, which records transactions as they are, the preventive audit interrogates them: it questions the treatment applied, checks whether it withstands a hostile reading and assesses how the transaction would look through an inspector's eyes. It is not a second set of accounts; it is a simulated inspection, carried out before the inspection, on the taxpayer's side.
The underlying argument is economic, but it rests on a few concrete advantages.
Correcting a wrong treatment through a corrective return (declarație rectificativă), before an inspection, attracts at most the tax itself and late-payment charges (accesorii: interest and penalties); the same error, discovered by ANAF, Romania's national tax administration, can attract a harsher sanctioning regime and criminal risk, if the amount is large.
The audit shows where the company is exposed, a fragile deduction, VAT applied incorrectly, an unadjusted intra-group transaction, and gives you time to build the justification.
Many risks call not for correction but for documentation: contracts, market reports, explanatory notes proving economic substance. This file is built better in peace than in the five days an inspector gives you.
So long as the inspection has not started, voluntary correction is, as a rule, still open. When ANAF sends a compliance notice (notificare de conformare), an audit already carried out lets you respond precisely, with the corrective return ready, not haphazardly.
The scope is calibrated to the taxpayer’s profile, but the typical core includes:
Significant transactions, reorganisations, related-party transactions, contracts unusual for the sector.
Separating expenses genuinely related to the economic activity from those exposed to reclassification, with emphasis on the borderline ones.
The right of deduction, the chargeable event and chargeability, exempt or special-regime transactions, cross-border transactions.
For groups, the existence and consistency of the transfer pricing file (dosarul prețurilor de transfer), alignment with the arm's length principle, the quality of the comparability analysis.
The risk that a formally independent collaboration is treated as dependent activity, with the whole train of retroactive obligations.
The correspondence between expenditure/assets and declared income, in view of the review of personal tax situation and the 70% tax on income whose source cannot be identified.
The preventive audit must be carried out by an independent tax adviser or expert, not by the company's own accountant. The reason has nothing to do with the accountant's competence; it is a structural conflict of interest: the accountant applied the very treatments that need to be assessed. Asking someone to criticise their own work is a guarantee of complacency, not of rigour. The independent expert comes with fresh eyes and the sole mandate of finding problems, not justifying them retroactively. In tax matters, this activity is carried out by tax advisers who are active members of the Chamber of Tax Advisers (CCF); when the analysis also touches on legal classification issues, it is combined with the lawyer's assistance.
The choice of profile matters: a tax expert report, prepared by a tax adviser, settles questions of classification and tax treatment (taxable base, VAT, deductibility, transfer pricing), while an accounting expert report, prepared by an expert accountant belonging to CECCAR, the body of chartered accountants, deals with the reconstruction and accuracy of the accounting records. Many preventive audits combine both perspectives, because a tax risk almost always has a root in how the transaction was recorded in the accounts.
A serious preventive audit does not end with a verbal discussion but with a structured report, containing two things: a risk map and an action plan. Risks are classified, usually on levels from high to low, by the likelihood of being raised at inspection and by the financial impact. For each one, the report sets out a course of action: correction through a corrective return, building the supporting documentation or, where the position is solid, keeping the treatment with the arguments ready.
In concrete terms, an expense with no clear link to the activity and no supporting document lands in the red zone, with a recommendation to correct; an intra-group transaction with a plausible price but no comparability file lands in the orange zone, with a recommendation to build the documentation; a correct VAT treatment that is poorly explained in the records lands in the yellow zone, with a recommendation to prepare the explanatory note. The practical result is a compliance file, the set of documents and explanations that turns a vulnerability into a defensible position.
The preventive audit has the greatest value when carried out ahead of a foreseeable event.
If the signs suggest an inspection is approaching (a targeted sector, a request for information, a compliance notice), an audit commissioned before the notice of tax inspection still catches the window for voluntary correction.
An asset sale, a reorganisation, a significant distribution is planned for tax purposes beforehand, not explained afterwards.
For companies with intra-group transactions and a transfer pricing file, an annual review keeps the risk under control and keeps the documentation up to date.
Finding a risk does not automatically require a correction. The decision is strategic and is made case by case, between two options.
Through a corrective return, indicated when the treatment applied is clearly wrong and indefensible. It stops the accrual of late-payment charges and removes the criminal risk linked to that amount.
With supporting documentation, indicated when the position has a serious basis and only needs to be better proven. Here, the mistake would be to correct a correct transaction “out of fear”, paying a tax that is not owed.
NOTE. Voluntary correction is not always the saving move it appears to be. A corrective return can, in certain situations, draw attention to a period or a transaction and trigger exactly the inspection you were trying to avoid. Likewise, an audit report documenting a risk, if it reaches the tax authority, can be read as an admission. That is why remediation decisions are not taken mechanically, “we correct everything we found”, but selectively, weighing each move and the signal it sends. A preventive audit without a strategy for how to use its findings can do more harm than good.
This is the question that often decides how the audit is commissioned. The key distinction is between the lawyer's professional secrecy (secretul profesional al avocatului) and the tax adviser's duty of confidentiality. The lawyer's professional secrecy, governed by Legea nr. 51/1995, is robust and enforceable even against criminal investigation bodies: lawyer-client consultations and correspondence, as well as the work prepared by the lawyer for the client's defence, enjoy enhanced protection and inviolability. The tax adviser, in turn, has a professional duty of confidentiality towards the client, but this does not amount to a privilege enforceable on the same terms against ANAF's investigative powers, which can request documents and information under the Tax Procedure Code.
The practical consequence: an audit report commissioned directly from an adviser and kept as the company's own working document is more exposed than an analysis carried out as part of legal assistance, under the umbrella of the lawyer's professional secrecy. That is why, when the stakes are high, the preventive audit is often structured through the lawyer, as part of legal advice, and the report is treated as a working document of the defence.
The concrete extent of the protection depends on the circumstances, though, and should be viewed without illusions. Professional secrecy covers lawyer-client communications and work prepared for the defence; a document held directly by the taxpayer, as a mere item of its records, on the other hand, remains exposed to the requests ANAF can make during an inspection. The conclusion is not that a report automatically becomes untouchable because it passed through a lawyer, but that how it is commissioned, drafted and kept significantly changes its degree of protection. That is precisely why structuring through a lawyer is done with this distinction in mind, and the decision on the form in which the audit is commissioned is itself a matter of strategy.
Even when the inspection comes anyway, the preventive audit changes the balance of power. A taxpayer who meets the inspection with a supporting file already built, treatments documented, risks anticipated, explanations ready, no longer negotiates from a defensive position. The tone of the inspection changes: instead of discovering, the inspector checks a position already argued. And if the matter still ends up in litigation, the compliance file becomes the raw material of the defence, including the technical basis for a possible party-appointed expert report.
To avoid creating the wrong expectations, a few boundaries. The preventive audit is not a guarantee that you will not be inspected; the inspection depends on ANAF's risk criteria, not on the taxpayer's wishes. Nor is it a “cleansing” of the past: it cannot make lawful transactions that were not, only identify the exposure and prepare either the correction or the defence. And it is not a substitute for legal assistance in a dispute: its role is spent before the conflict, preparing the ground for the situation where the conflict arises anyway. The audit's value lies in information and in time, it tells you where you are exposed and leaves you the time to act, not in some immunity it cannot offer.
Prevention does not concern companies only. The individual with visible assets, property, cars, investments, large expenses, is today a direct target, now that the power to carry out the review of personal tax situation and the 70% tax has been extended to the Antifraud structures as well, and income whose source cannot be identified is taxed at 70%. Here, the preventive audit takes the form of a source-of-wealth analysis: the correspondence between what was spent and accumulated, on one hand, and the income declared or otherwise justifiable, on the other, is reconstructed; the “holes”, the amounts without a documented source, are identified, and their justification (loans, gifts, earlier sales, older savings) is built while there is still time. Done before an ANAF notification, this audit allows correction and documentation from a position of strength. Done afterwards, it becomes a race against the clock.
The accountant records and files; the statutory audit checks whether the financial statements give a true and fair view, from an accounting perspective. The preventive tax audit has a different aim: it looks for tax risks, treatments exposed to reclassification, fragile deductions, unadjusted transactions, and assesses them through the eyes of a potential inspection. They are complementary tools, not interchangeable ones.
The risk exists and must be managed, not ignored. That is why how you commission the audit and what you do with its findings matter: structuring it through a lawyer, treating the report as an internal working document and a selective remediation strategy reduce that risk. The alternative, not knowing where you are exposed, does not protect you; it only leaves you to find out from the inspector.
Its value drops sharply once the notice of tax inspection is communicated and disappears, as a tool for voluntary correction, once the inspection begins. From that moment we are no longer talking about prevention but about defence, a different field, with different rules. That is why the audit should be commissioned at the first sign, not at the first inspector.
The cost of a preventive audit is a fraction of the exposure it manages. The cost-benefit ratio is assessed by comparing the analysis fee with the potential amount of an adjustment, the late-payment charges and the cost of litigation, a comparison that, for taxpayers with significant transactions, almost always tips in favour of prevention. We cover the cost-benefit analysis of the party-appointed expert separately.
This article is strictly informative and does not constitute legal or tax advice. Individual situations must be assessed on their own facts. Legislation as at 18 July 2026.
If you have an inspection under way or have just received a notification, the related analyses are grouped under tax inspection and the review of individuals. For how such matters are handled, see tax assistance.
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.