Radu Miruţă, Deputy: "The government should offer fiscal facilities to software companies that stubbornly pay taxes in Romania"

IT specialists can be kept in our country by offering attractive incomes, even by granting tax facilities, claims deputy Radu Miruţă (USR), secretary of the Commission for Information and Communications Technology (TIC) in the Chamber of Deputies.

Radu Miruţă told us: "The government must understand that the tax facilities for those who work in the field of software writing are not fads, but have a rationale related to the return of money to Romania. Writing software is not like working in agriculture, in construction, as a legal activity, it can simply be done by writing software from a computer or laptop anywhere in the world. So there is no intrinsic connection regarding the fact that, if a software product is from Romania, you have to work from Romania, or if the product is from the USA, you have to stay in that country. Given the possibility that people who do this work can go anywhere in the world, the only way to keep them in Romania is to give them facilities. The provision of these tax facilities returns to the state budget a greater amount than the payment of these facilities themselves. (...) Therefore, I believe that the Government should support more research in this area and should offer fiscal facilities to software companies that stubbornly pay taxes in Romania. Otherwise, the respective companies will migrate, they will produce exactly the same software, with the same people, only they will not be employed in Romania, but they will be employed in other states".

Deputy Miruţă mentioned that Romanian IT specialists are not only sought after by companies in Israel, but by large firms from all over the world, because they are well trained in the faculties of computers, electronics and informatics in our country.

The secretary of the TIC Commission stated: "I worked in a company where I dealt with interviewing such people and I proudly tell you that the young Romanians, graduates of these faculties, always passed the respective interview with flying colors, which means that these people are much better than others in the IT field, that they are much better trained. This thing is known in the market, and the challenge is no longer how much you pay such a person abroad, but how to find a good person. There are good people in Romania and we must offer the companies that employ them in our country some facilities so that at the end of the month they will be left with about the same amount of money that they could earn elsewhere. Otherwise, leave."

Radu Miruţă believes that, despite the need for IT specialists in the market in our country, the training conditions of software engineers and analysts should not be reduced. His Highness pointed out: "Regarding the IT workforce in our country, it's a matter of check&balance, because the easier you make it for students to go through college, the lower the quality. In general, Polytechnic students are still very good because the admission is more rigorous and because the level of study, rigor during the faculty is high. I would not make it easier for these people to get the much sought after bachelor's degree, but rather I would support the software industry in Romania so that companies can offer more attractive salaries to these people. If the demand is greater than the supply, they have only to offer higher wages".

The Secretary of the ICT Commission was also dissatisfied with the fact that our country trains many good engineers, but they end up doing research for projects outside of Romania, because outside the research-innovation centers in the faculties, in the area of companies, research-innovation is at a level close to zero. Radu Miruţă believes that in order to be able to cope at a high level in this industry, you must have the production area of engineers in parallel with a research area that will bring these engineers to the cutting edge of technology, because we have a category of employees who does the job on average, and one that creates and opens new horizons in the industry.