The Foundation for the Defence of Citizens Against State Abuses requests the Ministry of Finance to urgently send the Control Body to the Romanian Customs Authority, where the institution's management has imposed a plan on the mobile teams, establishing the number of inspections and sanctions, the value of fines and confiscations and, ween worse, the number of criminal reports that inspectors must draw up in the second semester of 2026.
According to documents presented in the press, the Cabinet of the President of the Romanian Customs Authority has sent the regional directorates the "rectified plan for the activity of the mobile teams". The document provides that the 51 mobile teams must carry out 2,432 inspections, apply 972 sanctions and fines, totalling approximately 8.8 million lei. The plan also provides for confiscations of over 3.5 million lei and the drafting of at least 13 criminal reports.
In a democratic state it is unacceptable for a public institution to determine in advance how many sanctions and how many possible offenses its inspectors must identify. The Romanian Customs Authority can plan the number of inspections and the areas to be checked, but the institution's management cannot determine in advance how many violations the inspectors must find and what the value of the sanctions should be. According to the European Union Customs Code, customs controls must be based primarily on risk analysis, and the sanctions for contraventions must be proportionate to the ascertained facts.
Establishing a number of criminal reports in advance is even more serious. The law obliges control bodies to notify criminal prosecution bodies when the established facts create a reasonable suspicion of the commission of a crime. Thus, customs inspectors have the obligation to establish the reality on the ground and apply the law, not to go on inspections with the obligation to return with criminal reports.
Setting targets for fines, confiscations and criminal charges may put pressure on customs inspectors to sanction economic agents in order to fulfil the plan imposed by the management of the Romanian Customs Authority and may expose citizens and economic operators to abuses.
At the same time, FACIAS draws attention to the statements of the President of the Romanian Customs Authority, Ioana Bădescu. She stated that the document that appeared in the press contains only indicative values and that customs inspectors will not be sanctioned if they do not reach them. At the same time, Ioana Bădescu specified that the institution will evaluate the staff at the end of the year based on the obtained results.
FACIAS requests the Ministry of Finance to order an inspection at the Romanian Customs Authority, an institution which is subordinated to it, in order to establish the persons responsible for the development and approval of the plan, as well as the legal grounds on which the targets imposed on customs inspectors were established. At the same time, FACIAS requests that the results of the inspection, the conclusions of the investigation and the measures ordered following the inspections be made public.