State institutions have 90 days to put the buildings and land in the private domain on the record

The Romanian State does not know exactly what it owns. Buildings, land, roads and networks sit in records kept by dozens of institutions, with values that do not match between the accounts and the inventory. On 13 August 2026 the Ministry of Finance published the manual for putting that in order. Order no. 968/2026 of the Minister of Finance, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 672 of 13 August 2026, approves the guidance on drawing up and updating the centralised inventory of the assets in the State’s public domain and the inventory of the immovable property in the State’s private domain. It is the second piece of public administration legislation this summer that affects every institution, after the amendment of the Administrative Code by Law no. 165/2026.

The legal basis is Article 57 of the Administrative Code and Government Decision no. 1.176/2024, which approved the technical rules for the two inventories. The guidance issued now is the next level down, the operational one: who does what, in which IT system, within what deadlines and with which documents.

The Ministry of Finance centralises both inventories, under Article 288 paragraph (2) and Article 356 paragraph (4) of the Administrative Code. The duty to comply with the guidance falls on the competent entities listed in Article 288 paragraph (1) and Article 356 paragraphs (1) to (3) of the same code, meaning the institutions that actually administer the State’s assets.

The order has five articles, and the guidance itself forms the annex, structured in chapters: the purpose, the procedure for working in the PATRIM system and the procedure for centralising the inventory of the assets in the private domain.

What it changes in practice

The nearest deadline is 90 days and it concerns the State’s private domain. The competent entities that are principal authorising officers must send the Ministry of Finance, both on paper and electronically, on a USB or DVD storage device, the inventory of the immovable property in the State’s private domain that they administer.

Annexes filled in incorrectly come back, with 60 days to redo them. If the data or the supporting documentation is wrong or incomplete, the Ministry of Finance returns the annex, and the entity has to redo it and resubmit it within no more than 60 days of receiving the letter of return.

Anything that does not arrive properly filled in on time is left out. Annexes that are not completed as required, or that lack complete supporting documentation once the deadline expires, are not taken into account in the centralisation and do not make it into the Government decision approving the inventory. For those assets, institutions then have to initiate separate draft decisions to add them later.

Updating the inventory has a deadline of its own: 90 days from the entry into force of the act that triggers it. Where an act changes the inventory, the data has to be entered in PATRIM PUBLIC or PATRIM PRIVAT within that window. Updating an asset requires all three operations in the workflow to be completed.

Data is taken over exactly, with no calculations of one’s own. The guidance states explicitly that working in PATRIM means taking the data over exactly as it appears in the act and its annexes, with no arithmetic required. Responsibility for the accuracy of the data stays with the entity that submits it.

Mergers, divisions and partial transfers come with their own description rules. For a merger, the characteristics of the resulting asset are stated; for a division, those of the asset being divided as well as of the assets that result from it. A partial transfer calls for the name, the MF number, the technical description details, the inventory value of each part and the classification code, with an exception for special-purpose buildings in defence, public order and national security, where only the declassified parts are shown.

A category also appears for assets with no administrative holder. The guidance defines the „PRIVAT FĂRĂ ADMINISTRATOR” situation, meaning assets identified by local authorities or from other documents as belonging to the State, but for which the entity holding them in administration has not been found.

Inventory values are compared each year with those in the accounts. There is a reconciliation procedure, accessible only on the internal network of the National Agency for Fiscal Administration, which checks the differences between the values in the annual financial statements, imported from Forexebug, and the values in the centralised inventory, with the PATRIM data frozen for as long as the reconciliation lasts.

Access to the system is personal and has to be withdrawn when an employee leaves. The institution is required to ask the Ministry of Finance to deactivate access rights when the accredited person changes duties or leaves the institution. Users and roles are managed in the „Managementul identității” (Identity Management) application.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

The clearest change is one of architecture. Until now, the two inventories were governed by separate orders, issued 3 years apart: Order no. 1.718/2011 of the Minister of Public Finance for the public domain and Order no. 668/2014 for the immovable property owned privately by the State. Both are repealed on the date the new order enters into force, and in their place there is a single set of rules, covering both inventories.

The second change is that the IT system becomes the centre of the procedure rather than an appendix to it. PATRIM is described module by module, PATRIM PUBLIC for the public domain and PATRIM PRIVAT for the immovable property in the private domain, with workflows, roles and responsibilities set out in the text. The user manuals are made available free of charge, in electronic format, on the Ministry of Finance website, in the „Domenii” (Domains) section, „Activele statului” (State assets) subsection.

The third change is transparency. The order requires the relevant public data from the two centralised inventories to be published on the Ministry of Finance website, with the exception of classified data. It is an obligation to publish, not merely an option.

Finally, the discipline of deadlines changes as well. The rule that annexes still incomplete when the deadline expires are not taken into account when the Government decision is issued shifts the cost of the delay onto the institution that is late: the asset stays out of the inventory until that institution separately initiates a decision to add it.

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