In brief

  • The Government has approved three payments to bodies of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, worth 31,500 euro in all. 750 euro for 2025, to the secretariat that runs the agreement on the exchange of country-by-country reports; another 750 euro, also for 2025, to the secretariat of the agreement on the automatic exchange of information on crypto-assets; 30,000 euro for 2026, to the Forum on Tax Administration. The total appears nowhere in the act; it is obtained by adding up the three articles.
  • All the money comes from the State budget, through the budget approved for the Ministry of Finance for 2026, including the two contributions that concern 2025. The ceilings are written in euro, and the sum in lei is worked out at the official exchange rate of the National Bank of Romania on the day of payment, so what it costs exactly is not known on the date of publication.
  • For citizens and for companies nothing changes. The decision authorises an expenditure of a single authorising officer, the Ministry of Finance. What it shows, in fact, is the price at which Romania sits at the table where the tax reporting rules it then applies at home are written, even though it is not yet a member of the organisation.
Act: Government Decision no. 776/2026 approving the payment of certain voluntary financial contributions of Romania needed for taking part in the working formats within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for 2025 and 2026
Published: Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 821 of 28 September 2026, page 3
In force from: from publication, 28 September 2026, because Article 12(3) of Law no. 24/2000 on legislative drafting rules provides that normative acts, with the exception of laws and ordinances, enter into force on the date of publication in the Official Gazette of Romania (Monitorul Oficial) unless they themselves lay down a later date, and the decision lays down no such date

Government Decision no. 776/2026 takes up half a page of issue 821 of the Official Gazette of Romania and approves three payments: 750 euro, another 750 euro and 30,000 euro. They are voluntary financial contributions to three bodies of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, abbreviated OECD, and added together they come to 31,500 euro. Small expenditure of this kind usually goes unnoticed, although it is public money all the same, just like the 230,200 lei approved for the two-day conference of the Permanent Electoral Authority. The difference is that here the payer has a single name, the Ministry of Finance, and the recipient is an organisation of which Romania is not yet a part.

The three sums, in the order in which they appear in the act. Article 1 approves 750 euro for 2025, to finance the secretariat of the coordinating body of the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement on the Exchange of Country-by-Country Reports. This is the mechanism by which tax administrations send one another the reports of multinational groups, and Romania signed that agreement in Bucharest on 19 December 2017. Article 2 approves another 750 euro, again for 2025, for the secretariat of the twin agreement, the one on the automatic exchange of information under the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework. Article 3 approves 30,000 euro for 2026, to the Forum on Tax Administration, the body in which the heads of the tax administrations of the participating States meet.

Article 4 says where the money comes from and how it is converted. The sums are provided from the State budget, through the budget approved for the Ministry of Finance for 2026, and the equivalent in lei is worked out at the official euro/leu exchange rate of the National Bank of Romania in force on the day of payment. The decision ends there. It has no annex, no table and no payment deadline.

What a „voluntary contribution” means. It is not the membership contribution a State owes because it is a member. The legal basis of the decision shows this clearly: Article 5(4) of Government Emergency Ordinance no. 40/2016, approved by Law no. 336/2023. Paragraph (1) of the same article covers voluntary contributions to the budget of international organisations, „în funcție de obligațiile asumate de România prin statutul de membru”, according to the obligations assumed by Romania through its membership status. Paragraph (4) is written expressly as an exception to it and concerns payments made „în vederea participării la formatele de lucru, proiectele și activitățile unor organizații internaționale cu care România colaborează în vederea aderării”, for the purpose of taking part in the working formats, projects and activities of international organisations with which Romania cooperates with a view to accession. That text was added to the ordinance only on 14 May 2018, by Government Emergency Ordinance no. 34/2018, precisely for situations like this one.

Romania is therefore not paying a membership contribution, it is buying access to certain working tables. Its status at the OECD is that of a candidate country: the accession negotiations began in 2022, and in the summer of 2026, according to the public statements of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, only one chapter out of 25 was still open, the one on trade. The act says nothing about this, but it chooses the legal basis reserved for organisations Romania has not yet joined, and that is in itself a piece of information.

What it changes in practice

There is a single direct effect and it is an accounting one: the Ministry of Finance receives the right to pay 31,500 euro from its own 2026 budget, without having to ask for any further approval. Until publication, the payment had no legal basis, because the emergency ordinance requires a Government decision for every contribution of this kind. From 28 September 2026, the payment can be made at any time.

The second effect has to do with budgetary exposure. The spending limits are written in euro, not in lei, and the conversion is made at the rate on the day of payment. That means that the sum which actually leaves the budget is not known even to the Government at the moment of approval, only the limit in foreign currency is. At 31,500 euro, the difference produced by a movement in the exchange rate is small, but the mechanism is the same at any amount.

The third effect is one of continuity. Without this decision, the 2026 contribution to the Forum on Tax Administration would not have been paid, and the two outstanding contributions for 2025 would have remained unsettled. Paying them keeps Romania inside the working formats in which the reporting standards are negotiated, including the one for crypto-assets, which it will have to apply in any event.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

The real novelty of the act is Article 2. The payment for the secretariat of the agreement on the automatic exchange of information on crypto-assets appears for the first time in a Government decision of this series. Until now three other lines were financed: the secretariat of the agreement on country-by-country reports, the Forum on Tax Administration and the project „Common Transmission System”. Crypto-assets now come onto the list, at the same level of 750 euro a year as the older line.

For the rest, the decision continues a practice begun in 2019. The contribution to the Forum on Tax Administration was 25,000 euro a year for 2019, 2020 and 2021, approved by Government Decision no. 613/2020 and by Government Decision no. 1.021/2021. From 2022 it rose to 30,000 euro and has stayed there for five years in a row, through Decisions nos. 1.512/2022, 1.283/2023, 738/2024, 1.037/2025 and now 776/2026. The contribution for the secretariat of the agreement on country-by-country reports has varied between 714 and 1,110.81 euro and has settled at 750 euro, a sum repeated identically since 2022.

What has changed, however, is the way approval is given. In 2022 and in 2023 all the lines fitted into a single decision a year. From 2024 they are split up: Government Decision no. 738/2024 took the forum, Government Decision no. 1.634/2024 took the other two, and in 2026 we already have Government Decision no. 400/2026, published on 25 May, for the „Common Transmission System”, and the present decision. The expenditure has not grown much, but it has been scattered across several acts.

Advantages and disadvantages

What it improves

  • Every payment is written separately, with its sum, its year and its recipient. Anyone who wants to check it has only four articles to read.
  • The limits written into the act really do limit. The formula „în limita echivalentului în lei al sumei totale de”, up to the lei equivalent of the total sum of, means that more than 750, 750 and 30,000 euro cannot be paid without another decision.
  • There is a single authorising officer, the Ministry of Finance, so responsibility for the payment and for reporting it is not split between institutions.
  • The crypto-asset line comes onto the list before the reporting rules take full effect, not afterwards, which is a good choice of timing.
  • The legal basis is the correct one, and the decision carries both countersignatures required by Article 5(4), that of finance and that of foreign affairs.

What remains a problem

  • There is no payment deadline. The act says from which budget the payment is made and at what rate it is converted, but not by when, and two of the three sums were already overdue on the date of publication.
  • The total appears nowhere. The 31,500 euro have to be added up by the reader, although the act is entitled „pentru aprobarea plății unor contribuții”, for the approval of the payment of certain contributions, in the plural.
  • The 2025 contributions are paid from the 2026 budget, without the act explaining why they were not approved in time.
  • The annual expenditure for taking part in the OECD working formats cannot be seen in a single place, because it is approved by separate decisions, on different dates.
  • Nowhere does it say what Romania receives in exchange. Not even a sentence about what taking part in these formats means, although that is the only thing that justifies the payment.

Practical advice

  1. If you follow the public money given to international organisations, look in the Official Gazette of Romania for the decisions beginning with „pentru aprobarea plății unor contribuții financiare voluntare”, for the approval of the payment of certain voluntary financial contributions. One or two appear each year, and only added together do they show the real expenditure.
  2. Remember that the ceiling is in euro. The sum in lei is known only after payment and depends on the National Bank rate of that day, so any figure in lei read before payment is an estimate.
  3. Do not confuse the voluntary contribution with the membership contribution. Romania is not a member of the OECD and owes no membership contribution, and every payment of this kind needs a Government decision of its own.
  4. If you work with country-by-country reporting or with the coming reporting of crypto-assets, remember the names of the two multilateral agreements in Articles 1 and 2. They are the framework in which the data you will be sending circulates.
  5. Check the sums in the official edition, not in reports about it. The act has four articles, fits on half a page and is found in Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 821 of 28 September 2026, on page 3.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Romania pay in total through this decision?
31,500 euro: 750 euro in Article 1, 750 euro in Article 2 and 30,000 euro in Article 3. The act does not write the total; it is obtained by addition.
Where does the money come from?
From the State budget, through the budget approved for the Ministry of Finance for 2026. That is what Article 4(1) provides, for all three sums, including for the two that concern 2025.
How much is that in lei?
It cannot be known in advance. Article 4(2) refers to the official euro/leu exchange rate of the National Bank of Romania in force on the date the payment is made, and the act does not fix a payment date.
Is Romania a member of the OECD?
No. It is a candidate country, and the accession negotiations began in 2022. The decision rests on Article 5(4) of Government Emergency Ordinance no. 40/2016, the text reserved for international organisations with which Romania cooperates with a view to accession.
How does a voluntary contribution differ from a membership contribution?
The membership contribution is owed by virtue of membership status and is paid because belonging to the organisation requires it. The voluntary contribution is not owed: it is approved case by case, by Government decision, for a particular working format and for a particular year.
Why are contributions for 2025 approved in 2026?
The decision does not explain. It says only that the sums for 2025 are provided from the 2026 budget of the Ministry of Finance, so payment was put off at least until the year following the one to which it relates.

Editorial analysis

The decision is correctly drafted and has nothing to put right in its letter: the legal basis fits, the three articles are clear, and Article 4 settles both the source of funding and the conversion rule. Its problem is not what it says, but what it chooses not to say, and that becomes visible only if you put the three articles side by side and do the arithmetic.

The first calculation is the calendar. The contributions in Articles 1 and 2 concern 2025 and are approved on 24 September 2026, that is 267 days after that year ended. In the same decision, the contribution in Article 3 concerns 2026 and is approved 98 days before the year ends. The same act is almost nine months late on one line and moves within time on another, without the text showing why. The comparison with the earlier series shows that this is no accident: the contribution to the Forum on Tax Administration has been approved within its own year every time since 2022, whereas the contribution for the secretariat of the agreement on country-by-country reports has always come a year behind, through Government Decision no. 1.512/2022 for 2021, through no. 1.283/2023 for 2022 and through no. 1.634/2024 for 2023.

The second calculation is the sum. The 31,500 euro in this act are not all that Romania pays this year for taking part in the tax working formats of the OECD. On 25 May 2026 Government Decision no. 400/2026 was published, approving another 20,000 euro for the project „Common Transmission System” for 2026 and a further 9,350 euro for developing the next version of the same system. Added together, the two decisions take the expenditure for 2026 to 60,850 euro, all of it from the budget of the Ministry of Finance. That figure appears in no act and can be obtained only by looking up the decisions one by one in the Official Gazette of Romania.

The third observation concerns the ratio between the lines. The two contributions for 2025 come to 1,500 euro together, that is under 5% of the total of the decision, while the remaining 30,000 euro are a single payment, the one to the forum. An act that approves a sum forty times larger than each of the other two could say, in one line, what exactly it is buying with it.

What should be changed

  • A payment deadline in the text of the decision itself. A formula of the type „payment shall be made within at most 30 days of entry into force” would close the undefined interval in which sums a year overdue now sit and would make the execution of the act verifiable.
  • The total, written once, in the operative part. A final paragraph saying „the total sum approved is 31,500 euro” costs one line and spares every reader, the Court of Accounts included, the addition it now does for itself.
  • A single decision a year for all the voluntary contributions to the OECD. The practice of 2022 and 2023 worked: one act a year, with all the lines. Going back to it would show in a single place what taking part costs each year, instead of scattering the figure across two or three acts published months apart.
  • Approval of contributions in the year to which they relate. If the budget of the Ministry of Finance includes the sums anyway, the decision can be adopted in the first quarter, not in the following year. That would also do away with the need to pay the obligations of one year out of the appropriations of another.
  • A sentence of justification for each line. The explanatory memorandum is not published in the Official Gazette of Romania, so the reader is left with the sum alone. A preamble saying what rights of participation the 30,000 euro buy would make the difference between expenditure that is explained and expenditure that is merely approved.

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. 821 of 28 September 2026, page 3 16 pages PDF, 123 KB the act starts on page 3

Open the official PDFDownload the PDF

The viewer is not shown on small screens. Use the buttons above to open or download the file.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For specific situations, consult a licensed attorney or tax advisor.