Eleven parties inspected by the electoral authority: four had no income in 2025, one fine in the whole batch

On 14 September 2026 the Permanent Electoral Authority published the results of eleven inspections carried out at political parties, for the 2025 financial year. All of them fit into six pages of issue no. 776 of the Official Gazette of Romania, and all are extracts, the short form the law requires to be published. This is the same institution to which a Government decision of 2026 recognised the right to hold documents classified „strict secret”, and the same one that transfers the monthly subsidy from the state budget to the parliamentary parties.

This kind of inspection is not carried out on request and does not follow a complaint. Article 44(1) of Law no. 334/2006 requires the authority to check every year, at every party, that the rules on income and expenditure have been observed. The parties checked in 2026 were entered in an inspection plan approved by the president of the institution, and each mission started from a written notice. From there on the mechanism is straightforward: the team asks for the accounting documents, the party has at most 15 days to make them available, and the inspection then establishes how much came in, how much went out and whether the reporting obligations were breached.

The figures that come out of the eleven reports say more than any single report does. The combined income of all eleven parties, over a full year, is 369,990.64 lei. In the month the reports were published, September 2026, the eight parties that receive a subsidy from the state budget collected 15,470,004 lei, according to data released by the same authority. One month of public funding for the parliamentary parties is therefore worth almost 42 times what all eleven parties under inspection raised in a year.

Here is what each inspection found. The amounts are those in the reports, and the last column gives the number and date of the report.

Three parties went through the year without taking in or spending a single leu: Identitatea Națională 1918, Hunedoara Unită and Uniunea Independentă pentru Tecuci. The fourth, Națiunea Română, had no income but spent 1,010.60 lei out of the money left in its account at the start of the year. The fifth, the party „Credință. Respect. Echitate. Demnitate”, had obtained legal personality on 12 December 2025 and its tax identification number only on 29 January 2026, so the inspection team found that the objectives of the mission had been left without an object.

At the other six, where there was financial activity, expenditure exceeded income in five cases. The only report that explains where the difference comes from is the one on Partidul Națiunea Română, which states plainly that the payments were made out of the funds available on 1 January 2025. The other four say nothing about the source of the gap: Câmpina Curată spent 31,572.44 lei more than it collected, Verticala Nouă 17,193.93 lei, Patrioților Qanon 229.34 lei, Conservator Democrat 165.70 lei. One single party closed the year in surplus, Renașterii și Dezvoltării Maramureșului, by 1.55 lei.

The largest turnover belongs to Partidul Câmpina Curată: 296,179.30 lei in income, of which 296,170 lei from donations and 9.30 lei from bank interest, against 327,751.74 lei in expenditure. Next comes Partidul Verticala Nouă, with 49,811.34 lei from membership fees and donations. The rest move in the order of thousands or hundreds of lei, and Partidul Renașterii și Dezvoltării Maramureșului ran for the whole year on 850 lei from membership fees.

One inspection ran into a wall. Alianța pentru Salvarea Buzăului did not send the documents requested through Inspection Notice no. 7.099 of 5 May 2026, received on 14 May, within the legal 15-day deadline, which expired on 2 June. On top of that, the party had filed neither the detailed report on income and expenditure for 2025, due on 30 April 2026, nor the annual financial statements. For refusing to hand over the documents it received a fine of 15,000 lei, and for the two reports not filed, a warning. The party’s income and expenditure for 2025 remained unverified, and the report does not say what comes next.

What it changes in practice

Publication in the Official Gazette of Romania does not, in itself, create new obligations for the parties inspected. Penalties are imposed by decision of the Permanent Electoral Authority, and that decision can be challenged in court under Article 54 of Law no. 334/2006. The fine of 15,000 lei is the only consequence in money in the whole batch. A warning costs nothing, but it stays on the authority’s record and weighs at a subsequent inspection.

For the other nine parties, the practical effect is the public finding that 2025 ended with no irregularities recorded. That is not the same as having the figures confirmed by an auditor: a statutory audit is compulsory only for parties that receive a subsidy from the state budget, under Article 45, and none of the eleven is in that position.

For a reader who is not a party member, the effect is informational and shows best in the aggregate. The reports show how small the financial activity of parties outside Parliament is, how rarely a penalty is imposed, and how little, in money, it costs to refuse to cooperate with an inspection.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

The regime under which these inspections were carried out comes from the republication of Law no. 334/2006 in Official Gazette of Romania no. 446 of 23 June 2015, which renumbered the entire text and changed two things that matter for what can be seen in this batch.

The first is the publication deadline. In the form republished in 2010, the results of each inspection had to be published within 15 days of it being carried out. Since 2015, the deadline has been 45 days. The authority therefore has three times more time than it had fifteen years ago, and the eleven reports went past even this wider deadline.

The second is the level of the fines. The 2010 form had a single penalty band, from 5,000 to 25,000 lei. The current form has three bands, and failure to produce the documents requested in an inspection and failure to file the annual report have moved into the band from 15,000 to 50,000 lei, under Article 52(2). Today’s minimum is three times higher than the minimum back then, and the fine imposed at Buzău sits exactly on that minimum.

The date on which parties publish their own accounts has moved as well: the obligations to publish in the Official Gazette of Romania the total amount of membership fees and the lists of donors fall due on 30 April of the following year, against the 31 March laid down by the 2010 form.

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