Technical information and procedures for the cash registers for commercial vending machines, relaunched in the debate this December in the Romanian government

The information and technical procedures for the cash registers to be included in all the commercial vending machines in our country were relaunched on Wednesday in the debate in the form of a draft GD, by the Ministry of Finance. This process is now active more than two years after its initiation. According to the authorities, the consultations with the business environment were long-lasting, and there was a need for adjustments to the rules initially thought out.

More specifically, this debate concerns commercial vending machines that work either with payments by bank cards or with acceptors of banknotes or coins. It is through these vending machines that a wide range of products are currently sold in Romania, such as drinks, food, sweets, books, and not only those but many other different products.

Since companies that own such vending machines (CRMs) are required to equip them with special cash registers, the Romanian authorities initiated this draft GD in March 2020 to establish the necessary technical information and procedures for this process. However, since taking the first steps in this process, the ANAF (TA) has discovered numerous questions arising regarding the technical requirements that would be needed to successfully adapt commercial vending machines to the new requirements of having an adaptation in the form of a cash register, thus, the debate that was planned to end in 2020 has lasted much longer and is still ongoing.

Because of this, parallel to the debate on defining the technical requirements for commercial vending machines, there is an ongoing process of adopting the newest Draft GEO that considers yet another postponement of the deadline for mandatory compliance. The currently-in force date for compliance is the end of 2022; however, as the authorities have stated, the mentioned date is most likely going to be postponed for another year depending on the decision on the technical side of the process as well as the final deadline that the Romanian officials will declare in the weeks to come.