Land management and land use – delineation of state-owned land, its purchase and sale, lease/lease, change of designation category – is coordinated at the national level by the State Property Agency and technically implemented by the State Institution “Real Estate Cadastre”. To support this process, a state program for 2019-2026 was approved, financed from the budget and supported by external partners, including the World Bank.
Local authorities, guided by government decisions on delimitation or change of designation, put land into circulation, registering them as stewards of public property and obtaining the right to alienate them into private hands, lease them out, etc. But this “vertical of power” operates smoothly only on paper. In reality, land manipulations usually steal from local budgets without creating conditions for financial autonomy.
Auditors of the Accounts Chamber, without being able to “catch by the hand”, come to a general conclusion about “insufficient internal control and participation of decision makers by virtue of their functional responsibilities to do so”.
The main inconsistencies relate primarily to land surveying. These include non-compliance with deadlines, insufficient interaction of authorities, and incompleteness of cadastral documentation. Thus, as of 01.01.2025, state-owned lands with a total area of 6007.42 ha out of 15 ATU inspected were not registered in the Real Estate Register, and those registered were not properly reflected in the accounting records of local authorities.
Many irregularities are also uncovered in land leasing. The inspection found that local authorities did not comply with the regulatory framework when granting state land for lease, use or superficies. In some cases, land was granted without organizing public tenders, and internal controls were insufficient, resulting in a loss of income subject to recovery of about 3.3 million lei.
Shortcomings in contract management were also identified, allowing unauthorized use of land and construction of buildings without documentation. In other cases, the authorities did not take effective measures to recover rent arrears amounting to MDL 3.9 million, and the registration and tracking of related arrears were inadequate. At the same time, some contracts with a term of more than 5 years were not registered in the Register of Immovable Property, which affected their legal certainty.
There are also a lot of inconsistencies in the alienation of land plots. There is no accounting of the assigned status of land, there is no report on the assessment of market value. As a result, local budget revenues decreased by 154.3 thousand lei, LPA bodies lack proper control over compliance with contractual terms of sale and purchase, and land plots depreciated.
And when changing the category of designation in some local administrations there are even “miraculous” transformations of the plots withdrawn from agriculture – the losses are not calculated and not compensated, the territory of the plots appears outside the boundaries of the settlement or city plan. The definition of land designation on paper does not correspond to that in reality, as noted in the Audit Chamber’s audit report.
Accordingly, the taxation of real estate reveals significant shortcomings, including those caused by systemic gaps that affect revaluation and asset registration rules.
General audit findings on real estate taxation:
The process of initial registration of privately owned real estate continues to suffer from a number of systemic and operational deficiencies. Such as lack of complete cadastral documentation, duplication of information on land plots and unresolved disputes over ownership rights, which limits the correct updating of data in the Real Estate Register. This jeopardizes its functionality, since it is on this that the determination of tax liabilities and the filling of local budgets depends
Uneven or insufficient application of the provisions of the Town Planning Code concerning the legalization of unauthorized constructions has led to the preservation of a significant number of assets outside the tax turnover. This situation reduces the tax base and directly affects the ability of local authorities to generate their own revenues
