The Foundation for the Defense of the Citizens Against State Abuses (FACIAS) draws attention to the fact that Romania is facing an extremely important test regarding the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, as the next payment request for the settlement of funds allocated to Romania through the NRRP must be submitted by the end of October this year. It will have a total value of €3.2 billion of which €2.1 billion is non-reimbursable financial support and €1.09 billion support in the form of a loan and is conditional on the fulfilment of 51 milestones/targets related to quarter I of 2022 and quarter II of 2022.
This subject matter is included on the agenda of the debate Monitoring PNRR: Possibility of renegotiating the plan on unfulfilled milestones, which will be held by FACIAS on Wednesday, November 2. the implementation of the PNRR will be analyzed, one year after its inception, with European officials, Romanian state representatives, experts, and university lecturers.
Even though Romania has received the money from the NRRP for the first payment request of 3 billion, it should be pointed out that for the first payment request the European Commission has assessed the 21 targets and milestones that had an implementation deadline of 31 December 2021. These milestones were very easy to meet, most of them were achieved by issuing simple ministerial orders.
Not all the milestones for the first quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2022 have been met by now, and one of the biggest problems is the implementation of the law on the protection of whistleblowers, which will transpose the Directive (EU) 2019/1937 on the protection of people who report infringements of Union law.
Another unmet milestone is the functionality of law and implementing rules for the domestic worker voucher scheme. Despite the fact that the government has published this law in the Official Gazette, it will not come into effect until January 1, 2024. We point out the fact that the PNRR's milestone achievement indicator expressly mentions "the legal provision that signifies the entrance into force of the law implementing the work ticketing system." In practice, the term of the normative act's entry into effect surpasses the length of the milestone envisioned by the PNRR.
The situation is even more difficult in the case of milestones and targets with a deadline of 30 September 2022, where only 9 of the 24 milestones and targets in the NRRP have been achieved so far.
Similarly to the launch of the call for construction and equipment of the 110 nurseries, which was carried out with record delays, the Ministry of Education is also delaying unacceptably long the equipment of classrooms in pre-university education establishments based on the minimum standards for equipping classrooms/laboratories/school workshops, although the tender procedure for equipping classrooms with furniture should have been triggered by launching the calls by 30 September.