The crisis have different impacts in different countries, based on specific factors, but mainly based on technology. From the fiscal point of view, this is crucial, because countries not so developed on e-services are facing major challenges in both sustaining the country budget but also tackling the personal staff issues related to safety. From this point of view, in such times the immediate set of actions is important, to set the path, the expectations and the pace of changes required by the gravity of the situation. Our response is strictly related on the readiness to easily adapt to such a difficult situation, in what it may be named as hostile environment.

As previously announced, the rapid extension of e-services is expected. However, in normal times the technological improvements require specific implementation periods, important budgets and specific bureaucratic procedures to be followed.
During the creation of the business continuity plans for this crisis, our tax administration understood that the most important asset is the staff (human factor) and their intuitive and innovative skills. Each department made considerable efforts to create new ways of sustaining and continuing their all activities and succeeded in a very short time to use the on-line benefits (call-center used remotely, tax dispute hearing on whats-up calls, training sessions on Zoom platforms etc). Moreover, is important to mention, there are no guidelines to be followed, there are no previous experience to share with only the benefits; briefly, it is the definition of an innovative time.

There are important external stakeholders (other public institutions like Trade National Register, Digital Agenda Agency etc, business representatives and even taxpayers) that our tax administration involved in the business continuity plans (we also created a Fiscal Analysis Group for immediate communication with business representatives and academia to sustain our efforts dedicated to support our taxpayers during this difficult period). Nevertheless, the plans are entirely owned by NAFA.

In such an approach, it is important to maintain the momentum; the plans should be carefully revised as frequent as possible; the staff implication requires important efforts from the top management.