Romanian Government Seeks NRRP Funding for Software Projects It Already Paid Millions For

Laura Popa

Reporter

More than 181 million lei (over 36 million euros) in European funds have been wasted on environmental projects that either "expired" or were never actually used. Now, the Romanian government is requesting funding through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan to revive these very same projects.

Mandatory Reporting on a Non-Functional, Multimillion-Euro Website

Under a 2021 emergency ordinance, all businesses operating from physical premises in Romania must track their waste production and report it to the National Environmental Protection Agency (ANPM). For instance, if you own a café, you are legally required to document every type of waste produced—including household waste—and submit it to ANPM. Failure to comply can result in fines of up to 40,000 lei.

Roxana, an entrepreneur from Bucharest, has been manually tracking her company’s waste for three years, previously submitting reports via email. This year, she attempted to use SIM.

"I tried twice, but the website crashed. Then I logged in again, and half the site was functional. Eventually, I reached the section requiring longitude and latitude for my company’s address—and got stuck," she recounts. When she attempted to register again, the system was down.

PressOne also tried to register—both as an individual and as a business. Not once, but three times. Each time, we encountered "a problem."

In reality, the problem runs deep. The Integrated Environmental System (SIM) was supposed to digitize the entire sector. It promised sweeping changes: any environmental permit could have been obtained online, and companies would have been able to submit mandatory reports through dedicated accounts.

Most importantly, the system would have enabled real-time monitoring of key environmental indicators—air pollution, waste, emissions—whereas before SIM, all this data was scattered across Excel files, making real-time tracking virtually impossible.

Moreover, using the environmental data stored in SIM, the National Environmental Protection Agency was expected to compile annual reports on issues such as the amount of waste collected in Romania. These reports are then submitted to the European Commission.

Given that Romania recycles just over 11% of its total waste—a figure already distorted by inaccurate reporting, as revealed in an investigation by Recorder—the way environmental data is collected and utilized is crucial for developing coherent policies in the field.

In 2016, according to a response provided to PressOne by the Ministry of the Environment, the financing contract for the implementation of SIM was signed, with the National Environmental Protection Agency (ANPM) as the final beneficiary. The total cost? Over 87 million lei, the equivalent of approximately 20 million euros at the 2016 exchange rate. The funds came from the European Union’s Sectoral Operational Program "Increasing Economic Competitiveness."

Rise Project exposed how, through a restricted tender process, the contract was awarded to a consortium of companies directly linked to former politician and businessman Sebastian Ghiță—now a fugitive.

A Multi-Million Euro System’s Rapid Demise

By 2025, nine years after the signing of the multi-million euro financing contract, the system has reached its "end of life"—a term used to indicate that certain components or technologies within a project will no longer be available or updated—according to the same response from the Ministry of the Environment.

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Over the past six years, more than 470 hectares of national forest land have been allocated by the government, without compensation, to the Oltenia Energy Complex (CEO) for the expansion or opening of new coal mines.

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PressOne sources say that, at its core, SIM is little more than an oversized form—one that, in its final version, could have been developed for as little as half a million euros, rather than the nearly 20 million it cost at the time the contract was signed.

Moreover, a major issue that contributed to the system’s poor functionality was the lack of allocated funds for maintenance work. This was confirmed both by the error message Roxana received after multiple failed attempts to register on the platform and by the warning that appears when searching for „ANPM reporting” on Google.

What Does the National Environmental Protection Agency - the main beneficiary of the defunct system- do? It is drafting a second project, this time for funding from the NRRP.

"ANPM is implementing the NRRP C7/I5 project—‘Digitized Public Environmental Services for the National Environmental Protection Agency’—through which electronic/public environmental services will be rewritten and updated by 30.06.2026, in accordance with current legislation, using new technology, with the implementation of electronic signatures and an online payment system," informs the Ministry of the Environment, the institution under which ANPM operates, in a response provided to PressOne.

Despite the system’s malfunction, numerous press releases issued by ANPM continue to appear in local media, urging stakeholders to use SIM for report submissions. The most recent example is from January 2025, when both a news site from Vrancea and one from Teleorman republished an ANPM press release directing economic operators to SIM for completing the air emissions questionnaire.

The Project That Would Have Revealed the Poor Management of Protected Natural Areas, Now Missing

On January 1, 2011, the National Environmental Protection Agency, as the beneficiary, launched a European-funded project set to be completed by September 2016. The project was called the „Integrated Management and Awareness System for Romania’s Natura 2000 Network”—or SINCRON, for short. With a budget of over 54 million lei (10 million euros), it was meant to develop an infrastructure that would allow the monitoring of management measures across all protected natural areas.

"All the measures from management plans were supposed to be collected, and anyone who wanted to check the restrictions or obligations for a specific area could access the platform and see them. On the other hand, the authority could track the implementation of the measures outlined in the management plans," explains Florin Stoican, president of the Urban Nature Network.

One of the primary responsibilities of a protected natural area’s administrator in Romania is to draft a management plan—a document detailing all necessary actions to ensure the area’s proper conservation and the fulfillment of its intended function.

Until 2018, protected natural areas could be entrusted to NGOs, commercial companies, or educational and research institutions, which were responsible for drafting management plans. The goal of SINCRON was to bring all stakeholders involved in managing protected areas onto a single platform, enabling clear verification of whether management measures were being implemented.

"There were indicators that would light up at deadlines. You could access the database at any time and check how many protected areas had a management plan, how many had overdue deadlines, by how much, which were in the critical zone, and as an authority, you could take action," adds the expert.

No Project, More Bureaucracy

The project’s main objective was never fulfilled, says Stoican: „What we actually saw from this project was just the promotional aspect—they printed some materials, made a few videos about protected areas, and produced some guides.”

Instead, the bureaucracy behind drafting management plans—already inefficient and lacking proper oversight—became even more burdensome.

"The only concrete thing professionals in the field are struggling with is the procedure for drafting management plans, which was approved by ministerial order and is a disaster. Even the people working with these plans say that no one reads them, let alone implements them," says the president of the Urban Nature Network.

PressOne asked the Ministry of the Environment about the project’s status, and the response was identical to that given for the Integrated Environmental System: the project has reached its „end of life.”

"The SINCRON project is ‘end of life’ because the core hardware/software infrastructure, specifically the SINCRON application, was developed in 2011-2012," the ministry stated.

The similarities with SIM don’t end there: the state hopes to revive this second project using the same NRRP funds.

"As part of the NRRP C7/I5 project, ANPM has requested (...) the rewriting and legislative update of the public service provided by the SINCRON project regarding the management plans for protected natural areas. This public service is set to be operational under the NRRP financing contract by June 2026."

Ten years after the first project was completed, ANPM now requires a new round of European funding to achieve the same objective as the original one.

"This is double funding. You’re asking for money twice for the same thing. And it was a lot of money," concludes Florin Stoican, president of the Urban Nature Network and director of Oltenia de Sub Munte, a UNESCO aspiring geopark.

„INSPIRE Puts Nature on Your Map” – A Broken Promise Funded by European Money

A third environmental project whose results are nowhere to be found today is INSPIRE. Intended as Romania’s national adaptation of the European directive of the same name, the project aimed to create a spatial database on environmental aspects. However, it remains little more than a promotional talking point in official materials.

"If SINCRON was about collecting and centralizing management measures, INSPIRE was about mapping the boundaries of protected natural areas in digital format. Basically, a database with all the digital boundaries, where anyone could click and find information," explains Florin Stoican.

With a budget of over 40 million lei in European funds, the second goal of the project was to correct discrepancies in the boundaries of some protected areas, as some zones had conflicting descriptions in different legal documents.

"The ministry was supposed to issue a government decision to approve the official boundaries so that everyone would have a single, definitive reference—rather than having seven different versions, with people using whichever suited them best," the expert adds.

Neither of the two objectives was achieved, according to the president of the Urban Nature Network.

"At one point, the boundaries were published on the website, but unofficially. Since people started using them as a reference, authorities weren’t happy and took them down," says Florin Stoican.

Scattered across the internet, a few maps from the project can still be found today, but they fall far short of the interactive spatial data that the project had promised. 

On the Ministry of the Environment's website, there is still an entire section dedicated to the project, which includes a link to the spatial databases.

The Ministry of the Environment’s website states that the public should be able to consult the boundaries of protected areas resulting from the project at limite.biodiversity.ro. However, when attempting to access the provided links, users find that the server where the data was stored no longer exists.

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