President of the Cluj County Association of Employers and Craftspeople (APM) Augustin Fenesan says that although red-tape for projects with European funding has soared to astronomical levels, nobody is considering a necessary simplification at a time when the beneficiary is required to obtain for a final report no less than 25,000 stamps and place his/her handwritten signature on 12,500 pages.Augustin Fenesan said that for a project worth 100,000 euros developed by APM with PHARE funding and completed in December 2009, a representative of the Intermediate Body has come every quarter to check on-site reality against the project stipulations in every minute detail. A dozen checks were performed to see if activities were organized, then the mentioned spending, the documents and the finalization of the project also came under scrutiny. Upon the ending of the project, a report was worked out with all the details, which comprised no less than 12,500 pages.
Apart from that, Fenesan had to seal each of the 12,500 pages with the ‘certified true copy’ stamp and with the institution’s round stamp, bringing the total number of seals to 25,000; he also had to sign all pages of the files. The APM president had to make two car trips to Bucharest just in order to bring to Cluj-Napoca the 12,500-page report prepared in justification of the unfolding of just one project.
“I used out ball pens and spent five tiresome nights to sign those 12,500 pages. This is outrageous: we fell Romania’s forests to fill entire rooms and hallways with piles of files. Whoever would go to the human resources management authority would find all hallways filled to the ceiling with hundreds of folders. They do not have the necessary conditions to keep them, so one must sneak one’s way through stacks of records,’ says the APM president.
