In brief
- The integrity form, the document every contracting authority fills in on SEAP for a public tender, has a new model, approved by joint order of the minister of economy, digitalisation, entrepreneurship and tourism and of the president of the National Integrity Agency.
- The model no longer sits in a statute. The annex to Law no. 184/2016, which had contained it since 2016, was repealed by Law no. 180/2026 with effect from 31 August 2026, and from 1 September 2026 the model can be changed by a simple order, without going through Parliament.
- The new form asks for a great deal more data: e-mail, telephone and full address for every person involved in the procedure, plus the personal data of the legal representative of the contracting authority, which did not go into the system before.
Published: Official Gazette of Romania (Monitorul Oficial) no. 735 of 1 September 2026
In force from: 1 September 2026
The form which public institutions fill in for every tender, so that it can be seen in good time whether someone on the committee has a link with a bidder, has left the statute book and moved into a ministerial order. Order no. 1.387/13.906/2026, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 735 of 1 September 2026, approves the new model of the integrity form. It comes four days after the publication of Law no. 180/2026, the same law which made office holders’ asset declarations confidential, a law which repealed the annex to Law no. 184/2016, that is precisely the model of this form. The repeal took effect on 31 August 2026, and the new model applies from 1 September 2026.
The mechanism set up by Law no. 184/2016 is known as the Prevention System, and in the everyday language of public procurement it is called PREVENT. It works like this: for every procurement procedure run through SEAP, the contracting authority fills in electronically an integrity form with the data of the procedure and of the people who decide it, the form goes automatically to the National Integrity Agency, and the integrity inspectors analyse it. If an indication of a conflict of interests appears, ANI sends an integrity warning, and the head of the institution is obliged to take measures, from replacing a member of the evaluation committee through to excluding the bidder.
The order was signed on 31 August 2026, at the Ministry of Economy, Digitalisation, Entrepreneurship and Tourism under no. 1.387, and at the National Integrity Agency under no. 13.906, on the basis of Approval Report no. 13.904 of 31 August 2026. The date is no accident: Article VII of Law no. 180/2026 required the joint order to be issued „not later than 31 August 2026”, that is on the very day the law entered into force. The order was signed on the last day of the deadline and published the day after.
What it changes in practice
The first effect is felt by every contracting authority in Romania, from ministries and hospitals to village halls, plus the utilities and companies that carry out sectoral procurement. All of them fill in the same form, on SEAP, from the publication of the tender documentation until the publication of the contract award notice. The obligation lies with the institution, under Article 5(2) of Law no. 184/2016, but the actual work is done by one or more persons whom the head of the institution has to designate by an administrative act, under Article 5(4).
The second effect concerns deadlines, and they have not changed, they have merely acquired penalties of late. The data on the evaluation committee are sent within 2 days at most of the committee being appointed or of any change to it, and in any event not later than the opening of the tenders. Section II, the one covering the bidders, is filled in within 5 days of the opening of the tenders. If that deadline is missed, SEAP automatically generates an alert simultaneously to the institution and to ANI. The integrity inspector then has 3 working days at most to send the warning, and the institution has 3 days to record in Section III the measures taken.
The third effect is the quantity of personal data entering the system. For each natural person in the form, that is decision-makers, consultants, members of the evaluation committee and co-opted experts, the new model asks for 14 fields: type of identifier (personal numeric code or PIN for foreign nationals), forename, surname, e-mail, telephone, sex, nationality, then country, county, locality, district, postcode, street with number, block, entrance, floor and flat, plus a descriptive address for cases where the number or the block are not known.
The fourth effect is that the form becomes sensitive to lots. The old model did not know the concept at all. The new model asks whether the procedure is organised in lots, then requires for each lot the number, the name, the estimated value, the date of opening of the tenders and the status of the lot, and for contracts it requires the number, the date of signature, the date of publication and the lots contracted. Since most large procurements are divided into lots, the ANI check can now be carried out lot by lot, not only on the procedure as a whole.
The fifth effect concerns the risk for those who do not fill in the form. From 31 August 2026, through Law no. 180/2026, Law no. 184/2016 has a new article, Article 9^1: failure to comply with the duty to fill in the form within the deadlines in Article 6(1) and (2) is an administrative offence and is punishable by a fine of 500 to 2,000 lei for the responsible person, while failure to designate a responsible person is punishable by a fine of 2,000 to 10,000 lei for the head of the entity. The fines are imposed by persons empowered within ANI. Separately, Article 9 provides that failure to fill in the form triggers of its own motion, once the procedure is over, the procedure for assessing the conflict of interests for the persons falling under Law no. 176/2010.
What has changed compared with the previous situation
The first change is one of rank, not of content. Until 31 August 2026, the model of the form was the annex to a law voted by Parliament. From 1 September 2026 it is the annex to a joint order of two heads of institutions. Article VII of Law no. 180/2026 says expressly that the order „is to be updated whenever necessary”, so the next changes will come the same way, by an order published in the Official Gazette of Romania. The form itself has been built for that: Section III has a new box, „Version of the form referred to”, which presupposes that there will be several versions.
The second change is the structure. The 2016 annex had a Section I divided into five groups numbered with Roman numerals, and within each group the boxes were numbered from 1 upwards, as far as 19 for the evaluation committee. The new model drops the numbering altogether and organises Section I into four subsections: I.1 the procurement procedure, I.2 the decision-makers, I.3 the consultants who draw up the tender documentation and I.4 the evaluation committee, with the members of the committee under letter A and the co-opted experts under letter B. The titles of the three sections now reproduce word for word the three letters of Article 5(1) of Law no. 184/2016, in the wording likewise given by Law no. 180/2026.
The third change is the volume of personal data. The original form of the annex, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 831 of 20 October 2016, required 8 items for a natural person: surname, forename, sex, nationality, personal numeric code, home address, locality and county. The new model requires 14, with the e-mail, the telephone and the address broken down into seven boxes. On top of that, a category of persons appears which did not exist before: the legal representative of the contracting authority, for whom forename, surname, personal numeric code, e-mail, telephone, sex, nationality and home address are required. In 2016, for the contracting authority only the name of the legal representative and the contact details of the institution were entered.
The fourth change runs the other way and makes the form smaller. In 2016, in the section on bidders, the first box was called „Capacity of the economic operator” and had five options: sole bidder, leader of an association, associate, subcontractor and supporting third party. In the new model the box is called „Type of participation” and has two options, sole bidder or association. The words „subcontractor” and „supporting third party” no longer appear anywhere in the form.
The fifth change moves work from the person to the system. In 2016, the date of opening of the tenders, the date of the procedure report and the date of award of the contract were filled in manually by the contracting authority at the relevant moments. In the new model, the final report of the procedure and the data on contracts carry note 3, „Taken over automatically from SEAP”, and the status of successful bidder is imported automatically. An old inversion has also been corrected here: note 4 of 2016 said that the date of opening of the tenders is filled in manually for online procedures and taken over automatically for offline ones, which was the wrong way round. Note 5 of the new model says the opposite, which is what it should have said from the start.
The sixth change is the identification of persons and companies from outside Romania. The old annex knew only the personal numeric code and the tax identification number. The new annex requires a „type of identifier”, personal numeric code or PIN for natural persons and CIF or TIN for legal persons, and note 11 explains: TIN is the identifier for legal persons outside Romania which do not have a Romanian tax identification number.
Advantages and disadvantages
What it improves
- The check can be carried out lot by lot, not only on the procedure as a whole, which matters in large procurements, where a conflict of interests usually arises on a single lot.
- Full contact details, e-mail and telephone, allow ANI to reach directly the person concerned by a warning, without going through the institution’s registry.
- Taking the final report and the contract data automatically from SEAP removes from the form a number of boxes that people used to forget or fill in wrongly.
- The PIN and TIN identifiers allow foreign participants to be entered correctly, when until now there was nowhere to put them.
- The box „Version of the form referred to” ties an integrity warning to the exact state of the form at the moment it was issued, which helps in any later challenge.
- A model contained in an order can be corrected within weeks rather than within a parliamentary session, if a box turns out to be useless or missing.
What remains a problem
- The same thing reads the other way round as well: the content of the form no longer needs Parliament, so a box can be removed by an act signed by two people, without public debate.
- Subcontractors and supporting third parties no longer have anywhere to be entered, although procurement law treats them expressly as a source of conflict of interests.
- Dropping the numbering of the boxes makes it harder to write a precise integrity warning and harder to compare two versions of the form.
- The volume of personal data has almost doubled for each person, without the order saying who has access to it or how long it is kept.
- The form contains no box showing who actually filled it in, even though from 31 August 2026 it is precisely the responsible person who risks the fine.
- The order has no transitional provision of its own, and authorities have to look for the rule applicable to procedures under way in Article XI of Law no. 180/2026.
Practical advice
- If you are a contracting authority, check first whether you have the administrative act designating the person responsible for the integrity form. Its absence is, from 31 August 2026, an administrative offence on the part of the head of the institution, with a fine of 2,000 to 10,000 lei.
- Do not wait for the opening of the tenders to deal with the form. The obligation runs from the publication of the tender documentation on SEAP, and the data on the evaluation committee have to be sent within 2 days at most of its appointment and in any event before the tenders are opened.
- Put the 5-day deadline from the opening of the tenders for Section II into your calendar. If it is missed, SEAP sends the alert to the institution and to ANI at the same time, so the delay does not go unnoticed.
- Gather the contact details of the committee members in good time. The new model asks for e-mail, telephone and full address, with postcode and district, information that institutions do not usually keep in a single place.
- If subcontractors or supporting third parties appear in the procedure, deal with them separately. The form has no box for them, but the duty to prevent conflicts of interests remains, and Article 60 of Law no. 98/2016 mentions them expressly.
- When you receive an integrity warning and the data in it are out of date, you have 3 days from the publication of the warning on SEAP to send the inspector supporting documents. The inspector then has 2 days to confirm or set aside the warning.
- Once the head of the institution has ordered the measures, update Sections I and II and fill in Section III within 3 days. Note the unique number of the warning as well, since it is the key by which everything is linked.
- For procedures started before 31 August 2026, check Article XI of Law no. 180/2026: verification procedures under way are completed under the rules applicable on the date the procurement procedure began.
Frequently asked questions
What is the integrity form?
Who fills it in?
What data go into it?
When is it sent?
What happens once it has been sent?
What is the risk for anyone who does not fill in the form?
Why was this order needed?
Does anything change for companies bidding for public contracts?
From when does the new model apply?
Errors and inconsistencies in the published text
- The annex to the order, Section II, the box „Tip participare”, type of participation. The only box through which the form records the capacity of an economic operator offers two options: „ofertant unic/asociere”, sole bidder or association. The words „subcontractant” and „terț susținător”, subcontractor and supporting third party, appear nowhere in the order. Article 5(1)(b) of Law no. 184/2016 requires, however, that the form contain „calitatea și datele de identificare ale operatorilor economici”, the capacity and the identification data of the economic operators, and Article 8(2) of the same law obliges the head of the contracting authority to order, following a warning, „excluderea ofertantului, candidatului, ofertantului asociat, subcontractantului sau terțului susținător, aflați într-un potențial conflict de interese”, the exclusion of the bidder, the candidate, the associated bidder, the subcontractor or the supporting third party who are in a potential conflict of interests. The law therefore names five capacities, and the form can express two of them. Article 60(1)(a), (b) and (d) of Law no. 98/2016 expressly defines as situations potentially giving rise to a conflict of interests those concerning supporting third parties and proposed subcontractors. The repealed annex to Law no. 184/2016 had, in the form published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 831 of 20 October 2016, a box „Calitatea operatorului economic” with all five options. The consequence is that, for two of the categories the law expressly targets, the Prevention System receives no data, and the head of the institution cannot receive a warning requiring their exclusion.
- The annex to the order, Section II, the box „Loturi pentru care a depus oferte”, lots for which tenders were submitted, and footnote 17. The box carries note 17, which says „Se va importa automat în funcție de contractul/contractele câștigat(e)”, it will be imported automatically according to the contract or contracts won. The box asks for the lots for which the operator submitted a tender, while the rule for filling it in derives them from the contracts won. The two do not coincide: a bidder who bids on five lots and wins only one would appear in the form with a single lot, and a bidder who wins no lot would appear with none at all. Moreover, Article 1(1) of Law no. 184/2016 defines the mechanism as an „ex ante” check, and Article 6(2) requires Section II to be filled in within 5 days of the opening of the tenders, that is at a moment when no contract has yet been awarded. A reader acting in good faith cannot establish whether the box is filled in at the opening of the tenders, with all the lots bid for, or after the award, with only those won.
Editorial analysis
The order does what had to be done, on time and without detours. The annex to Law no. 184/2016 was repealed by Law no. 180/2026 with effect from 31 August 2026, and if the joint order had not appeared, the PREVENT mechanism would have been left without a model form, that is without an object. The two institutions signed on 31 August and published on 1 September. What remains, in between, is one day on which the annex was repealed and the new model was not yet in force, a day of vacuum that nobody seems to have noticed while drafting.
The deadline out of which the order was born deserves to be read with a pencil in hand, because it contradicts itself. Article VII of Law no. 180/2026 says that the joint order „se emite în termen de 30 de zile de la data intrării în vigoare a prezentei legi, dar nu mai târziu de 31 august 2026”, that is, it is issued within 30 days of the date this law enters into force, but not later than 31 August 2026. The law was published on 28 August 2026 and entered into force on 31 August 2026, 3 days after publication. The 30 days would have expired on 30 September, but the ceiling falls on the very day the period begins. The issuing bodies had, in practice, a single day, and the 30-day period never existed. The fact that the order bears the date of 31 August 2026 says that somebody read the ceiling and met it at the last moment.
Moving the model out of the statute and into an order is, in itself, a defensible choice. A technical form which depends on the architecture of SEAP has no business sitting in an annex to a law, where every comma requires a legislative amendment. The price shows in the content, however: at the first rewriting done with a free hand, the form lost the subcontractors and the supporting third parties, that is exactly the categories which Article 60 of Law no. 98/2016 lists as a typical source of conflict of interests, and gained seven address boxes for every person. An act of Parliament would have been harder to change, but also harder to thin out quietly.
The comparison with the 2016 version shows the direction: for each natural person 8 items of data were collected, now 14 are collected, and to them is added a whole category of people who were not in the system, the legal representative of the contracting authority, with personal numeric code, home address, e-mail, telephone, sex and nationality. At the same time, the form has no box at all showing who filled it in, even though from 31 August 2026 the responsible person risks a fine precisely for how and when he fills it in. More is therefore collected about the people being checked, and nothing about the person who can be held to account.
What should be changed
- Reinstating the subcontractor and the supporting third party in the box „Type of participation”. The two current options cover only the sole bidder and the association. With all five capacities the 2016 annex had, the Prevention System could look for links in the subcontracting chain as well, where a conflict of interests is hardest to see with the naked eye and where Article 60 of Law no. 98/2016 expressly looks for it.
- Rewriting note 17 so that the lots bid for are imported from the tenders submitted, not from the contracts won. As it stands, the box can be filled in only after the award, so it cannot serve an ex ante check. Corrected, it would allow ANI to compare, immediately after the opening of the tenders, the composition of the committee with the list of bidders on each lot.
- A box for the responsible person designated under Article 5(4) of Law no. 184/2016. The fine of 500 to 2,000 lei applies to that person, but the form identifies him nowhere. With the name and the administrative act of designation entered in the form, the offence would become enforceable without a separate investigation, and the institution would have proof that it had complied with the duty to designate.
- The box „Bidders with whom he has an employment relationship” for consultants and co-opted experts as well. Today the question is put only to the decision-makers and to the members of the committee. The consultant who writes the specifications and the co-opted expert who assesses the tenders technically influence the outcome at least as much, and the form asks them nothing about their links with the participants.
- Renumbering the boxes, as they were numbered in the 2016 annex. An integrity warning and any subsequent challenge refer to a specific box. Without numbers, the reference is made through the name of the box, which can change in the next version of the form, and the box „Version of the form referred to” is left without a stable point of reference.
- A footnote saying who has access to the personal data in the form and how long it is kept. The order doubles the volume of data collected about each person and says nothing about the regime governing it. An express reference to the legal basis and to the retention periods would spare every contracting authority from having to construct its own answer to a data subject access request.
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. 735 of 1 September 2026 16 pages PDF, 112 KB the act starts on page 7
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This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For specific situations, consult a licensed attorney or tax advisor.