CONAF: Fiscal Code underwent 78 changes in first 9 months, most SME write-offs in 2024

The Fiscal Code underwent 78 changes in the first nine months of the year, and from here you can draw your own conclusions about how quickly an entrepreneur can adapt, said on Wednesday, the president of the National Confederation of Women's Entrepreneurship (CONAF), Cristina Chiriac. "I listened very carefully to what was discussed before, I can tell you how the Romanian economy looks, from the perspective of a representative of the business environment. I will tell you that, in 2024, we had 78 changes to the Fiscal Code, in the first nine months. From here you can draw your own conclusions about how quickly an entrepreneur can adapt in terms of not only fiscal changes, because they also have social repercussions, in the area of competitiveness, etc. Then, I will tell you that In this economic spectrum, SMEs, from our point of view, represent the backbone of the Romanian economy, and I will give you some figures of employees, while we have 3.1 million employees in the SME sector. Calculate how big the impact is when we refer to the frequency with which the minimum wage changes, practically over a million of Romanian employees have guaranteed minimum incomes. It is clear that there is concern in the area of the business environment, because we are looking very carefully at what the budget deficit means. We notice that this is among the largest in the European Union and there are only a few countries that surpass us," stated Chiriac, at the "Competition in key sectors" conference.In the view of the CONAF representative, Romania and Europe, in particular, face extremely low competitiveness."If we keep looking at the SME market, I will tell you that this year saw the most write-offs, terminations of activity and suspensions of activities in the last five years. This means a very low resilience, in especially in the area of micro-enterprises, to adapt to negative equity. These things are not due, for example, to inflation, one of the highest in the European Union, but to the fact that there were many external factors that negatively impacted their economic activity Here I am referring to the impact of prices on the energy sector, where we are looking extremely carefully, knowing that, from March or April, this ceiling may change. We are facing an area of extremely low competitiveness and we cannot ignore what is happening in Germany, where at the last exhibition fair attended by Romanian entrepreneurs, in September, more than 70% of the exhibitors were from China, something that we also feel in Romania," said the CONAF chairwoman.