In brief
- 133,810,276.60 lei including VAT is the total cost approved by the Government for the IT platform through which the Ministry of National Defence is to move online 68 public services it currently delivers on paper or by e-mail: admission to military schools and academies, urban-planning and overflight approvals, NATO codification for companies, military pensions, access to archives and museums.
- Three quarters of the money comes from the European Union. The European Regional Development Fund contributes 100,289,864.30 lei, or 74.949299%, and the state budget puts in 33,520,412.30 lei, or 25.05%. The spending runs over 36 months from the signing of the financing contract and, broken down by budget year, means 434,000 lei in 2026, 66.19 million in 2027, 45.10 million in 2028 and 22.09 million in 2029.
- What is actually being bought: two mobile data centres in 20-foot steel containers, 44 kW each, one at the Communications and Information Technology Command in Bucharest and one at the military non-commissioned officers’ communications school in Sibiu, acting as a back-up in case of disaster, plus 32 servers, security equipment, a public portal with online payment and a chatbot, and training for 320 people.
- The figure missing from the act is how much running the system will cost once the minimum 60-month warranty included in the price expires. The explanatory memorandum says who pays for the upkeep, the ministry and the „Ferdinand I” Military Technical Academy, out of their own budgets, but it gives no amount, even though the software and the implementation services are worth 92.64 million lei.
Published: Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 854 of 12 October 2026, pages 5-10
In force from: 12 October 2026, the date of publication, since the decision sets no later date and Government decisions enter into force on publication unless they provide otherwise
The Government has approved spending of 133,810,276.60 lei on an IT system for the Ministry of National Defence, and the act approving it contains the full breakdown of the sum, down to the last leu. Government Decision no. 807/2026 was adopted on 9 October 2026 and published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 854 of 12 October 2026. It has a single object: it approves the explanatory memorandum, the document that justifies why the money is worth spending, for the project the act calls „Hub de servicii MApN”, the MApN services hub.
The name tells an outsider nothing, so it is worth unpacking. Three different things sit under it. The first is a public portal on which a citizen or a company will be able to file a request to a military body entirely electronically, pay the fee online, follow the progress of the file and receive an electronically signed answer. The second is the infrastructure the portal will run on: two data centres of the ministry’s own, built inside containers, and the security equipment that protects them. The third is a package of internal applications, from document and electronic-archive management to a cyber-security training laboratory and a learning platform with artificial-intelligence components for the military schools.
The list of services covered shows why the project does not concern only the army. Bodies of the ministry issue approvals for spatial planning and urban development documentation, for aeronautical and overflight activities, for hydrographic and underwater activities, for 5G equipment and technologies and for land transactions in areas of defence interest. They provide NATO codification services to businesses, geospatial and cartographic services, administer military pensions, run recruitment and admission to military secondary, post-secondary and university education, give access to archive, museum and library holdings, and let out premises. According to the explanatory memorandum, at the time the financing application was filed these 68 services were carried out in physical form, on paper, or by e-mail, with no possibility of filing entirely electronically, of paying online, of tracking the progress of a request or of receiving an electronically signed answer.
What it changes in practice
The decision creates no rights for anyone and puts no service online. What it unblocks is the payment. Under Article 42(1)(a) of Law no. 500/2002 on public finances, explanatory memoranda for investments under the „other investment expenditure” heading are approved by the Government when the value exceeds 100 million lei, a threshold set by Government Emergency Ordinance no. 187/2022, in force since 29 December 2022. The project costs 133,810,276.60 lei, so the competence lay with the Government, and without this decision the money cannot be committed.
The financing has three components, and the amounts close exactly. The European Regional Development Fund gives 100,289,864.30 lei, or 74.949299% of the total eligible value. The national public contribution from the state budget, provided under Government Emergency Ordinance no. 133/2021, is 32,910,535.07 lei, or 24.594923%. The beneficiary’s own co-financing adds 609,877.23 lei, or 0.455778%. Added together, the three come to 133,810,276.60 lei and to exactly 100%, and the non-eligible value is zero, which means that not one leu of the project falls outside the reimbursement mechanism. Out of the Romanian taxpayer’s pocket goes 33,520,412.30 lei directly, a quarter of the total.
The phasing appears twice in the act, on two different logics, and both close on the same total. By year of implementation: 26.86 million lei in the first year, 71.11 million in the second, 35.84 million in the third. By budget year: 434,000 lei in 2026, 66.19 million in 2027, 45.10 million in 2028 and 22.09 million in 2029. The average per year of implementation is 44.60 million lei, but the peak falls in the second year, which on its own takes 53.1% of the money. The year 2026 receives 0.3% of the total, which shows that the whole schedule hangs on the date the financing contract is signed.
The structure of the spending shows where the sum actually goes. The equipment itself, including the two data centres, costs 19,300,851.57 lei, or 14.4% of the total. Programmes, software solutions and licences cost 42,263,233.32 lei, and the installation, analysis, design, development, migration, integration and testing services cost 50,373,500.32 lei. Together, the software and the implementation work come to 92,636,733.64 lei, or 69.2% of the project, 4.8 times more than all the equipment put together. Cyber-security for the network and the systems has a separate line, of 15,653,624.80 lei, or 11.7%. The rest is split between the internal project team (2,487,875.56 lei), training (1,089,000 lei), indirect costs (1,671,771.03 lei), consultancy (453,750 lei), financial and technical audit (393,250 lei) and information and publicity (123,420 lei).
The act also fixes responsibilities. The holder and beneficiary of the investment is the Ministry of National Defence, working through the Communications and Information Technology Command and the Cyber Defence Command, in partnership with the „Ferdinand I” Military Technical Academy. Article 3 of the decision places responsibility for implementation on all three. The payments, however, run through the academy’s budget, and the split between partners set out in the memorandum shows why: the ministry, as lead partner, commits 2,434,571.50 lei, and the academy 131,375,705.10 lei. In other words, the leader administers 1.82% of the budget and the partner 98.18%.
What has changed compared with the previous situation
The project does not appear for the first time on 12 October 2026. The technical specifications were endorsed by the Technical and Economic Committee for the Information Society through opinion no. 792CTE of 13 June 2025, an opinion upheld by a letter of 5 February 2026. The matrix that verifies that the project does not overlap with others was approved by the Minister of National Defence on 25 November 2025, and the financing was approved by Minister’s Order no. M.123/2025. What was missing was the Government’s agreement to the expenditure, and that came on 9 October 2026.
For the citizen, nothing changes on 12 October 2026. The 68 services carry on running on paper and by e-mail. The approved document provides for 36 months of implementation from the signing of the financing contract, and within that the core investment, in other words the contract for the supply and implementation of the IT system, from signature to final acceptance, has a maximum of 24 months. The first moment at which anything can actually be used by the public therefore lies at least two years after the contract starts, and the breakdown by budget year pushes the end into 2029.
The declared starting point also changes. The memorandum invokes the Digital Economy and Society Index, where Romania sits in the bottom places on the digital public services dimension: a score of 44 for the availability of services for citizens against a European average of 75, and a score of 42 for businesses against an average of 82, while only 17% of internet users in Romania use e-government services. The target the country has taken on through the national Digital Decade action plan is 100% online availability for essential public services by 2030, and this project is one of the pieces with which the distance is meant to be covered.
A last change concerns where the data sits. The existing infrastructure is described in the memorandum as inadequate, fragmented, technologically obsolete, poorly interconnected and with a low level of cyber-security. In its place, two modular data centres are being built on a private-cloud architecture: the primary centre at the headquarters of the Communications and Information Technology Command, at 33 Șoseaua București-Măgurele, sector 5, and the secondary centre, acting as disaster recovery, at the Military School for Warrant Officers and Non-Commissioned Officers for Communications, Information Technology and Cyber Defence in Sibiu. Each operates autonomously, and the memorandum states that all data processing and storage takes place exclusively on the ministry’s own infrastructure, with no components in public infrastructures. The licences are perpetual, the warranty and technical support run for at least 60 months, and the source code and the documentation become the property of the beneficiary.
Advantages and disadvantages
What it improves
- Three quarters of the spending, 100,289,864.30 lei, comes from non-repayable European funds, while the national budget covers 33,520,412.30 lei. The ratio favours the Romanian taxpayer compared with an investment financed entirely from the budget.
- The sum is published broken down into eight expenditure categories, with values down to the ban, the hundredth of a leu, and the totals check out: the subtotal for investment in assets comes to exactly 111,937,585.21 lei, and the eight categories added together come to exactly 133,810,276.60 lei. Transparency of an IT investment budget at this level of detail is rare.
- The second data centre, at Sibiu, has a declared disaster-recovery role, and each of the two operates autonomously. For services that will handle pension claims and admission files, geographical redundancy is not a luxury.
- The source code of the components developed and the whole of the documentation become the property of the beneficiary, and the licences are perpetual. The ministry is not left tied to a single supplier in order to use what it has paid for.
- The data stays on the ministry’s own infrastructure, with no components in public infrastructures, and 15,653,624.80 lei are allocated explicitly to cyber-security, with next-generation firewalls, protection against denial-of-service attacks, log monitoring, multi-factor authentication and vulnerability management.
- The memorandum includes a complementarity matrix against ten projects financed earlier through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, seven in military hospitals and three in military academies, and explains why they do not overlap. This is exactly the check that is usually missing and whose absence leads to paying twice for the same thing.
What remains a problem
- The cost of running the system once the warranty expires carries no figure at all. The memorandum undertakes to maintain the investment for at least 5 years from the final payment, with operating, upkeep, support and maintenance costs out of its own budgets, but it does not estimate what that means for a bundle of 92.64 million lei of software and services.
- The result indicator, the one that measures whether the project has succeeded, has 2029 as the reference year for a baseline value of zero and has no target year at all. It is impossible to establish from the act by when the 290,000 users a year have to be reached.
- The electronic signature component for citizens is sized at a minimum of 300 qualified certificates, valid for 12 months, and 30,000 signed documents, for a target of 290,000 users a year. That works out at one certificate per 967 intended users, and what happens with renewal after the first year appears neither in the budget nor in the text.
- The memorandum promises savings of time and money for citizens and a reduction in the ministry’s operating costs, with no starting value whatsoever: there is no current average time for settling a request, nor a current cost per request. Without those figures, the promised saving will not be verifiable in 2029 or later.
- Almost 70% of the money goes into software and implementation services, and only 14.4% into equipment. The part hardest for a third party to assess, and the most exposed to overpricing, is also the largest.
- Responsibility for implementation is shared by Article 3 between three bodies, but the money runs almost entirely through the third: 98.18% of the budget is committed by the „Ferdinand I” Military Technical Academy, while the lead partner administers 1.82%.
- The list of the 68 services is not annexed. The act says how many will be digitalised, not which, so nobody outside the ministry can check at the end whether the number was met with the services that matter to the public.
Practical advice
- If you have an admission file, an urban-planning or overflight approval request, a NATO codification request or a pension file to submit to a body of the Ministry of National Defence, prepare for the paper procedure. The decision of 12 October 2026 approves the money, it does not open the portal, and the system has 36 months of implementation.
- IT companies can watch the procurement: the contract for the supply and implementation of the IT system concentrates 92,636,733.64 lei in software, licences and services, plus 19,300,851.57 lei in equipment. The notices appear in the electronic public procurement system, in the name of the „Ferdinand I” Military Technical Academy, which commits 98.18% of the budget.
- To follow the project, note the identifiers given in the act: SMIS code 348457 and call code PCIDIF/129/PCIDIF_P2/OP1/RSO1.2/PCIDIF_A7. The financing contract is concluded with the Authority for the Digitalisation of Romania, as intermediate body, on behalf of the Ministry of Investments and European Projects.
- Do not count on the free electronic signature offered through the project. The package provides for a minimum of 300 qualified certificates and 300 video identifications, valid for 12 months. If you need an electronic signature for dealing with the administration, obtain one separately.
- If budget execution interests you, follow the state budget laws for 2027 and 2028: that is where 83.2% of the spending falls, 66.19 million and 45.10 million lei respectively, in the budget of the Ministry of National Defence, under public investment programmes.
- Businesses that apply for approvals for 5G equipment and technologies or for land transactions in areas of defence interest are among the direct beneficiaries of the digitalisation. It is worth following the ministry’s announcements on the portal going live, because these approvals are among the ones with deadlines that matter commercially.
Frequently asked questions
What is „Hub de servicii MApN”, in plain language?
How much does it cost and who pays?
What exchange rate was used for the conversion into euro?
When will I be able to use these services online?
Which army services are being digitalised?
Where will citizens’ data be stored?
Does the decision give me any right from 12 October 2026?
Errors and inconsistencies in the published text
- Annex, table of indicators, indicator RCR11, both rows. The baseline value is 0, and the reference year of the baseline value is 2029. The table has no column for the target year, so the only year attached to the 230,000 and 60,000 users a year is 2029, declared as the year of the zero value. A reader in good faith arrives at two different conclusions: either 2029 is in fact the year by which the target has to be reached and the column heading is wrong, or 2029 is indeed the point from which measurement starts, in which case the target has no deadline. The same memorandum uses 2026 as the reference year for indicator RCO14 and for the additional indicator on the 68 services, even though all three describe the same project with the same zero starting value. The difference matters: the result indicator is the one against which fulfilment of the objective is checked and, through it, the retention of the 100,289,864.30 lei of non-repayable financing.
Editorial analysis
The reason this budget can be read in the Official Gazette of Romania (Monitorul Oficial) is a figure, not a transparency policy. The public finance law requires the Government’s agreement for explanatory memoranda on investments of more than 100 million lei, a threshold raised to that value by Government Emergency Ordinance no. 187/2022. The project costs 133,810,276.60 lei, which is 33,810,276.60 lei above the threshold, 33.8% above it. Had the same platform been sized at 99 million, the approval would have stayed with the principal authorising officer, the explanatory memorandum would not have gone through the Government and nobody outside the ministry would have learned either what the data centres cost or how many electronic signature certificates are being bought. The observation is not a reproach addressed to this project, but a finding about the threshold: public visibility of the state’s IT spending starts at 100 million lei.
The ratio between cost and what is obtained can be calculated, and the result is worth discussing. For 68 services brought online, that is 1,967,798 lei per service. For the target of 290,000 users a year, adding the two regions together, that is 461 lei per user in the first year of operation and around 92 lei per user per year if the system really does last the 5 years of maintenance undertaken. Training costs 3,403 lei per person, for 300 users and 20 administrators. None of these figures is scandalous for an institutional IT system with data centres of its own, but they only make sense if the 290,000 users turn up. Divided across the 68 services, the objective means 4,265 users per service per year, and the memorandum does not show, for any single service, how many requests are filed today. Without that starting figure, the target can be neither validated as realistic nor challenged as modest.
The weakest part of the memorandum is what follows commissioning, and here two provisions combine badly. The warranty and the technical support run for at least 60 months, and maintenance of the investment is undertaken for at least 5 years from the date of the final payment. The two windows look identical, but they do not start at the same moment: the warranty runs from the delivery and acceptance of the equipment, which has to be completed within a maximum of 24 of the 36 months of implementation, while the maintenance obligation runs from the final payment, so roughly a year later. The result is a gap of the order of twelve months at the end of the sustainability period in which the ministry has to keep the system running with no warranty and no sum provided for in the act. The memorandum states neither the date from which the warranty runs nor the annual running cost, even though it lists explicitly what goes into it: operation, upkeep, support, hardware and software maintenance and periodic security audits. For 42,263,233.32 lei of licences and 50,373,500.32 lei of development and integration services, the absence of a single recurring-cost figure is the central gap in the document.
On measurability, the memorandum stands better than the average document of its kind, but not evenly. The numerical indicators are verifiable: 68 services, 2 public institutions supported, 300 plus 20 people trained, 290,000 users a year. The technical capacities are verifiable too, described down to the piece: 2 data centres of 44 kW, 32 servers, 4 next-generation firewalls, 4 routers, 10 data centre switches, 18 laptops. The benefits the money is being spent for, by contrast, remain declarative: less bureaucracy, time savings for citizens, lower operating costs, better decision-making. Not one of them has an indicator. A single number would have changed that, the current average time for settling a request, because it would have allowed a comparison in 2029 with the time afterwards. The future operator, on the other hand, is clearly named, which is no small thing: the Communications and Information Technology Command and the Cyber Defence Command, with the payments running through the „Ferdinand I” Military Technical Academy, which commits 98.18% of the budget against the lead partner’s 1.82%.
What should be changed
- Add a column for the target year to the indicator table and correct the reference year of the baseline value for indicator RCR11, where 2029 appears for a value of zero. Practical effect: it becomes possible to establish by when the 290,000 users a year have to be reached, and to check fulfilment of the objective without interpretation.
- Enter in the memorandum an estimate of the annual running cost after the warranty expires, together with the date from which the 60-month warranty runs. In practice, the ministry enters the budget negotiations for 2032 and the years after it with a publicly stated figure, and the gap between the warranty window and the investment maintenance window is not discovered when it expires.
- Publish the baseline values for the average settlement time and for the administrative cost per request, at least for the most used of the 68 services. The consequence: the promised savings become verifiable in 2029, and later projects have a point of comparison.
- Correct the coding of the expenditure categories in the value structure table: two different lines, the software licences of 42,263,233.32 lei and the implementation services of 50,373,500.32 lei, carry the same code I.c, and code I.b is missing. The effect: the budget can be set line by line against the ceilings in the applicant’s guide.
- Size the electronic signature component for citizens to the user target, or state explicitly what the alternative is for the rest. 300 certificates valid for 12 months, for 290,000 users a year, means one certificate per 967 people. The gain for the citizen: they find out in advance whether filing entirely electronically requires a signature of their own, bought separately.
- Annex the list of the 68 electronic public services. The result: at the end of the project what gets checked is not just the number itself, but also whether the services with the largest volume of requests were digitalised, rather than the ones easiest to digitalise.
Original text of the legal act
The text below is reproduced in Romanian, the official form of publication.
The full text, as published in the Official Gazette of Romania
Official Gazette of Romania no. 854 of 12 October 2026, pages 5-10 16 pages PDF, 117 KB the act starts on page 5
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