The tax authorities announces operation ICEBERG, which targets the large companies, particularly focused on the ways profits are shifted out from Romanian subsidiaries.

This could be analyzed in the context where the National Committee of Prognoses, a highly politically subordinated institution, have signed an agreement with the National Agency for Tax Administration by which the Committee is involved in the procedure to select the entities targeted by the tax audits, based on non-transparent criteria.

The larger context is the high increase of the public expenditures in 2019, doubled by an expectation of the GDP increase below the previous estimations, yet a huge pressure to collect more revenues to the state budget.