I pay my bills from my phone in two minutes. I order a book in the evening and it is on my desk the next day. I can check my bank account at any hour, move money, and sign contracts with partners abroad by e-mail. Then I need a certificate from the local town hall and suddenly I am back in another century: a printed form, a photocopy of my ID card, a stamp, a queue and a polite “come back tomorrow, the lady in charge is not in today”.
I have worked online since 2005: MarketOnline, Floria, Știri de Bine (a positive-news site) and, for the past few years, Retargeting. My whole job is about making life easier for customers on the internet. Maybe that is why the gap between how Romanians live and how the state treats them hurts me more than it hurts others. I think that gap is about ten years wide.
People have already moved online
Romania has some of the fastest fixed broadband in Europe. People say it often, with pride, and it is true. The smartphone has become something almost everyone owns, from students to grandmothers in the countryside who video-call grandchildren working in Spain or Italy. Facebook is where people argue about politics, sell cars and organise protests. Paying by card online no longer scares anyone, and e-commerce grows every year, even if many shoppers still prefer cash on delivery.
In other words, Romanian citizens have already made the switch. Not all of them, not everywhere, but most economically active people spend a good part of their day on a screen. Banks, mobile operators, retailers and even utility companies have adapted. The state, for the most part, has not.
The state is still stuck at the counter
I do not want to be unfair. Some things work. Ghiseul.ro (the national portal for paying public fees) lets you pay some local taxes and fees online by card. Companies can file part of their tax returns electronically. A few town halls, mostly in big cities, have started to offer services online. But these are islands, not a system.
This is what dealing with the administration still looks like for an ordinary person or an entrepreneur:
- Paper forms asking for exactly the data the state already has: name, personal identification number, address, company details.
- Certified copies of documents issued by the very institution you are handing them to.
- The rubber stamp, which in many offices still matters more than a signature.
- Queues at ANAF (the tax authority), at ONRC (the trade register), at the local tax office and at the population registry, often in the same week and for the same issue.
- Town halls where property or car tax can only be paid in cash at the cashier’s desk, because they never joined the online payment system.
- Institutions that do not talk to each other: one asks you for a certificate from the office next door, and you become the courier between two databases.
And the electronic ID card with a chip, which citizens of other European countries have carried for years, remains for now a matter of debates and postponed projects here. Our ID card is a laminated piece of cardboard that cannot identify you anywhere online.
What a digital state looks like: the Estonian lesson
Everyone quotes Estonia, and rightly so. A small country, emerging from the same post-Soviet space, with few resources, which decided in the 1990s that it could not afford a large bureaucracy and built a digital one instead. There, your ID card is also a digital key: you use it to sign documents, see your medical records, file your income tax return in a few minutes and, for more than ten years now, even vote online. Since 2014, through the e-Residency programme, even foreigners can become “digital residents” and run an Estonian company from anywhere.
The secret is not a particular app but a principle: institutions exchange data through a shared infrastructure, and citizens are never required to give the state the same information twice. If one agency already has your address, the others take it from there. Easy to say, hard to do, but possible. They proved it.
Small fixes, big effects
This does not require an overnight revolution. I believe any government, whatever its colour, could deliver concrete changes within a few years without huge budgets:
- A “once only” rule: no institution may ask you for a document issued by another state institution. It fetches it itself.
- Mandatory online payment for all taxes and fees, in every town hall, not only in those that feel like it.
- Dropping the company stamp as a legal requirement. Electronic signatures should be the rule, not the exception.
- A real electronic ID card that can be used to log in and sign, not just to travel.
- Simple online forms written for people rather than lawyers, which you can fill in on a phone.
- Online appointments wherever there is a counter, so you do not lose a morning only to learn that one paper is missing.
None of this is science fiction. All of it already exists somewhere in Europe, and some of it even in a few Romanian institutions. The problem is that it is not the norm.
Why it matters for entrepreneurs
For an entrepreneur, time lost dealing with the state is the most expensive time there is. Say you run a small online shop with two or three employees. Every trip to a counter, every folder of paperwork, every day spent waiting for a certificate is a day you are not selling, not improving your product, not looking after customers. In a large company, that is a department’s job. In a small one, it is the owner’s.
Paper bureaucracy has a less visible effect too: it discourages people. Many young people with good ideas never register a company, not because they fear the market but because they fear the paperwork. Those who do start often pay an accountant not only to keep the books but also to shield them from the counters. A digital state would in fact be the cheapest form of support for small businesses a government could offer.
Why it matters for a fairer society
There is also a dimension that goes beyond the economy. Paper, queues and counters are the natural habitat of “small favours” and connections. Wherever a decision depends on a clerk who might misplace your file, there is a temptation to “help” things move faster. A digital system, with clear deadlines and a visible trail for every request, does not eliminate corruption, but it starves it of a lot of oxygen.
Digitalisation is also a form of respect. The state is effectively telling you that your time matters. For a pensioner standing three hours in the cold or a mother with a small child, an online service is not a tech gimmick but a matter of dignity. And for the millions of Romanians working abroad, a digital state would mean no longer flying home for a power of attorney or a document from the town hall.
What we can do in the meantime
I do not believe in waiting for someone at the top to fix things. Some of it is up to us: use online services where they exist, to prove they are useful; ask our own town hall to accept online tax payments; point out, publicly and politely, where things do not work. And those of us in the digital industry can offer our skills. Romania has excellent software developers who build products for companies all over the world. It would be a shame if the state were the only client that never benefits from them.
I am an optimist by nature. I think Romania can close the gap faster than it seems, precisely because people are already prepared. You do not need to convince them to use the internet. The state just needs to show up where they already are.
Which piece of bureaucracy would you get rid of first, if you could? Which trip to a government counter would you most like to replace with a single click?