The Competition Council has signed the financing contract for the development of a new state aid register – Regas 2, a platform for monitoring and controlling state aid granted from national and European funds.
The financing contract signing ceremony for the Regas 2 project was attended by Romania’s Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, Minister of Economy, Digitalization, Entrepreneurship, and Tourism Bogdan-Gruia Ivan, Head of the Prime Minister’s Chancellery Ștefan-Radu Oprea, President of the Romanian Authority for Digitalization Dragoș-Cristian Vlad, Director of the Special Telecommunications Service Ionel-Sorin Bălan, and Vice President of the Competition Council Daniel Picu.
“The Regas 1 platform has 180,000 users and has recorded over 280,000 signed contracts. Regas 2 will make the entire process of monitoring and granting state aid simpler, more transparent, and faster – both for companies and authorities. We will introduce interoperability mechanisms that will allow institutions connected to the platform to ‘speak the same language’ and exchange data automatically. This way, we will reduce bureaucracy and eliminate wasted time in the approval process,” stated Bogdan Ivan, Minister of Economy, Digitalization, Entrepreneurship, and Tourism.
Regas 2 aims to facilitate the use of the platform and reduce the time required for verifying the eligibility conditions of companies applying for state aid under schemes provided by public authorities. At the same time, it will fulfill the transparency obligations for state aid granted in Romania, as imposed by the European Commission. Additionally, an e-learning module will be developed to inform and train users on state aid regulations.
“The first version of the state aid register, Regas 1, has proven its usefulness over more than nine years of operation, but it is time to move to the next stage. Regas 2 will have optimized functionalities and develop new services for both companies and authorities. At the same time, the platform is crucial for ensuring compliance with state aid regulations,” said Daniel Picu, Vice President of the Romanian Competition Council.
The Regas 2 project – “Improving the Mechanism for Monitoring and Controlling State Aid for the Benefit of Public Authorities, Citizens, and Businesses” – will be implemented by the Competition Council in partnership with the Special Telecommunications Service (STS).
Regas 2 is financed under the Intelligent Growth, Digitalization, and Financial Instruments Program 2021-2027 (PoCIDIF). The financing contract has a total value of 43,386,258 RON, of which 32,517,696 RON is provided by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The implementation period is 30 months.
The development of the Regas 2 state aid register will focus on:
- Optimizing functionalities in response to legislative changes and state aid mechanisms;
- Ensuring interoperability with MySMIS, the IT system developed for managing non-reimbursable financial assistance for the 2021-2027 financial period, as well as with the IT systems of state aid providers in Romania;
- Integration with the European Commission’s Transparency Award Module (TAM) for state aid transparency;
- Ensuring conditions for integration into the government cloud;
- Implementing a new hardware and software infrastructure for the platform’s operation;
- Migrating data from Regas 1 to the new system;
- Developing new services for citizens and businesses to facilitate access to statistics, information, and training on state aid granted in Romania.
The Competition Council has approved over 650 state aid measures through Regas 1, where more than 280,000 contracts have been signed between state aid providers and beneficiary companies.
Regas 1, the state aid monitoring system, was developed to meet the ex-ante conditionality imposed by the European Commission for using structural funds during the 2014-2020 programming period. Regas 1 was developed with STS support between 2014 and 2015 and has been in use since 2016.
Regas 1 includes over 400 institutions providing state aid or de minimis aid, with more than 180,000 users, of whom 105,000 represent companies benefiting from state aid.