The banking community has been concerned about the consequences of fraud related to forgery and to identity theft as well as to the use of forgery in the case of labour documents. We continue to state the necessity of implementing some projects having as aim the protection of good-faith customers and the avoidance of incidents which could affect the banking sector’s image and stability.

The Romanian Association of Banks (RAB) proposes to the authorities a set of concrete institutional collaboration manners with a view to provide efficient legal protection for the users of bank products and services, needless to say with the customers’ previous and express consent.

RAB has been interested in the continuation of the actions related to the completion of the project on verifying the authenticity of the identity documents submitted by bank customers applying to be granted diverse banking products, documents considered suspicious. The verification of their authenticity in the data base of the Directorate for Persons Records and Data Bases Management of the Ministry of the Administration and the Interior targets the protection of both customers and banks by eliminating the fraud related to forgery and to identity theft. The assessment of such actions’ impact should lead to enhanced protection for good-faith customers, with their previous express consent.

Moreover, the setting up of a formal framework for improving lending by mitigating fraud risk and a smoother operational lending process has been one of the main concerns of the banking community.

On February 1, 2022, it was published the Order of the president of the National Agency for Fiscal Administration no. 146/2022 for approving the conditions for providing information, the framework model of the collaboration protocol, the procedure regarding the exchange of information between the National Agency for Fiscal Administration and the signatory legal persons of private law, as well as the access methods in dedicated information systems according to art. . 70 ^ 1 para. (1) lit. b) of law no. 207/2015 on the Fiscal Procedure Code.

The text of the Order establishes the new conditions that legal entities must meet for the safe keeping of personal data, subject to the annual audit of security IT systems by an independent external auditor.

We remind you that the new collaboration Protocol published as an annex to Order no. 146/2022 maintains the previous provisions by which the banks can verify the revenues of loan applicants natural persons and the financial statements of legal persons (with the applicants’ consent). This document targets the improvement of lending by mitigating fraud risk and a smoother operational lending process, following the simplification of the documentation requested from applicants, by providing an adequate mechanism leading to the population’s more intensive usage of bank products and services and preventing and combating fiscal evasion, by delivering the information held by each signatory in a prompt manner.

In order to query fiscal information, credit institutions, signatories of the Protocol, request from applicants the signing of a written “Agreement”, on paper or in electronic format, document which observes the law. These agreements include persons’ identification data, their contact data, as well as an express mention regarding the validity of an Agreement, i.e. 5 business days since the date the respective agreement was signed by a taxpayer. We must mention that RAB does not process the personal data related to this protocol belonging to third parties, the customers; this data is processed by the bank where the respective customer has his/her account.

The previously collaboration protocol was amended and supplemented with provisions related to the protection of fiscal secrecy, as well as for the case of an online request of a natural person, to obtain information and request consent.

The new collaboration protocol between the National Agency for Fiscal Administration and credit institutions enters into force on August 16, 2022.