Andrian Gavrilice
The head of the Finance Ministry, Andrian Gavriliță, said that the ministry intends to make calculations and understand “where the holes are” in the system. The minister asked for assistance from patronages in construction.
“Let’s try to make calculations, where does so much cache for these salaries, if they are declared, in these sectors come from? For our part, we will do everything we can to raise awareness, to ensure transparency, to simplify procedures – we want to keep things as simple as possible. We need to understand where these ‘holes’ are: some of them we are already identifying, others are yet to be discovered,” Gavriliță said at a meeting of the National Commission for Consultation and Collective Bargaining.
For their part, the representatives of the patronates declared their readiness to analyze the situation and dialog.
Chairman of the Federation of Patronages in Construction and Production of Building Materials Igor Malay believes that one of the key reasons for shadow employment is the imperfection of the law on public procurement. According to him, the current principle of selecting the winner at the lowest price leads to the fact that tenders are won by companies with minimal human and technical potential, which unofficially engage people to implement projects.
Malay recalled that patronages have repeatedly proposed to revise the approach to public procurement, making price not a basic, but only one of the selection criteria – along with human resources, engineering and technical potential of the company. “Then not the cheapest, but the most capable will win,” he emphasized.
As an example, Malay cited the results of his own analysis: one company managed to win 33 tenders during 2025 in different localities.
“A logical question arises – what company with officially registered staff is capable of doing so many jobs at the same time? Obviously, this company wins due to low price but attracts workers who are not officially employed,” Malay observed.
According to official data, in 2025, control bodies identified 8,086 people working without legal registration, while in 2024 there were about 3,000 such cases. Agriculture, construction and HoReCa remain the most problematic sectors.
