Firms with no employees winning Romania’s town-hall contracts: who they are, what they won and what for

How many firms with no employees get public money, and how much#

Between July 2023 and September 2026, 12,496 firms that reported zero employees in every year they filed accounts won public purchases worth 4.02 billion lei. That is 0.62% of all the money awarded through SEAP, Romania’s public procurement system, over the same period, and 9.9% of the winning firms that filed accounts.

The typical one won 30,002 lei between July 2023 and September 2026: a repair, a concert, a translation, a design job. The chart places each of the 12,496 firms by the money it received.

The base is wide and holds little money: 8,810 firms got under 100,000 lei each, together 5% of the money. The top is thin and holds most of it: 381 firms got at least a million lei each, 70% of the money.

Why a firm can have zero employees#

The owner’s own work

The director of a small company often works under a mandate contract rather than an employment contract, so does not count as an employee. A musician, a translator, a site supervisor or an architect invoices their own work through their company.

Resale

A firm that buys goods from a wholesaler and delivers them to the town hall can run with the owner alone.

Subcontracting

The work can be done by other firms, paid by the winner.

Consortia

Some firms join a consortium as junior partners and the lead partner does the work. Here a consortium member is shown with its share of the contract only.

Group staff

Some firms use staff employed by a sister company in the same group.

Of the 3,528 no-staff firms that live mostly on public contracts or got at least a million lei, 30 were picked at random and checked one by one at the tax agency (ANAF), the trade register, SEAP notices and the press. 27 had an ordinary explanation: 16 were small jobs done by the owner, 10 resold goods, one was founded late in the year. For 3 none was found.

Compared with staffed firms doing the same kind of work, in the same county and of the same size, these 3,528 firms depend only slightly more on a single public buyer (+4.9 percentage points) and are only slightly more often chosen without a tender (+1.5 points). The test, written down before the calculation, required a gap of at least 10 points or at least 7 of the 30 firms without an explanation. It did not pass: the gaps are small, and 3 firms had no explanation.

What no-staff firms that got at least a million lei have in common#

Of the 381 no-staff firms that got at least a million lei, 324 entered the comparison; the other 57 had filed a single set of accounts, in their founding year, or showed employees in the accounts held by ANAF. 18 of the 324 had been checked by hand before the test was written and were set aside, so 306 were compared with 594 staffed firms that got similar sums for the same kind of work. Three things set them apart.

Part of the gap may be natural: a newly founded firm has not yet had time to hire, and no revenue in the previous year can have several explanations. The figures describe where the money goes; they do not prove wrongdoing. Two other signs that were checked showed no clear difference: a change of name or activity code (CAEN codes changed for many firms anyway in 2025) and a registered address shared with at least 50 firms.

In 746 town halls, at least one of the compared firms with at least a million lei and at least one of the three signs won contracts. The firm cards show the registration date at ANAF, revenue in each year and the date of each purchase; inactive-taxpayer status is not shown on the cards.

How much of each town hall’s money goes to firms with no employees#

In half of the town halls that awarded anything to such firms, they took less than 0.8% of the money awarded. The map shows the share for every commune and town.

At the top end are small communes, where one firm can take almost everything: in Nalbant (Tulcea), 84% of the 21,014,498 lei awarded between July 2023 and September 2026 went to no-staff firms.

How the figures were worked out#

Purchases. Every award published by SEAP on data.gov.ro from 1 July 2023 to 30 September 2026: direct purchases (online and offline), award notices and contracts. Framework agreements count only through their call-off contracts, which carry real money; notices re-published after changes count once; an award published in two files counts once. 85 direct purchases above 5 million lei that are typing errors were removed (89.9 billion lei in all, including a 62.4 billion lei purchase of pork). 649.89 billion lei remain. A contract won by a consortium is split equally between the partners.

Employees. The average number of employees in the 2023, 2024 and 2025 accounts (Finance Ministry open data). A firm has “no employees” if it filed accounts in at least one of those years and reported 0 in every year it filed. A blank field in the open file is a declared 0, checked at ANAF. 99.4% of the money won by Romanian companies is linked to a set of accounts.

Checking the cards. The open 2025 file is incomplete. For every firm with town-hall contracts that was missing a year, that year’s accounts were requested directly from ANAF: 5,690 firms checked, 57 had employees and were removed from the cards and from the town-hall totals. The registration date is the tax registration date from ANAF, which does not change when a firm moves to another county. Each town hall’s tax ID was checked against ANAF’s register (name and county). National totals come from the open data and name no firm.

The tests. The hypotheses, thresholds and what would kill the story were written down and fixed with a hash before the calculation, and every later correction is recorded separately. The first test, on the 3,528 stage-one firms (the table then: 733.9 billion lei, before the final clean-up of re-published notices), compared dependence on a single buyer and purchases without a tender with those of staffed firms; the gaps, +4.9 and +1.5 points, did not pass the 10-point threshold. The second, written after the first and before its own calculation, for firms with at least a million lei: registered at most a year before their first award of at least 100,000 lei, 17.0% against 2.8% (95% interval for the gap: +9.8 – 18.6 points); no revenue in the year before that award, 11.4% against 0.8% (+6.9 – 14.5 points); on the list of inactive taxpayers on the day of their largest contract, 2.6% against 0.0% (+1.0 – 4.6 points). After the first calculation, the registration date was taken from ANAF instead of the trade register, which resets the date when a firm moves to another county; before this correction the results were 16.5%, 11.8% and 2.5%, and the test passed then too. Where the previous year’s accounts are missing (about 70 firms in each group), the firm is counted without this sign, so both percentages may be underestimates.

Limits. The search covers town halls only (3,187 communes, towns, cities and Bucharest sectors); schools, hospitals and municipal water companies are not included. Sole traders (PFA, II) file no company accounts and do not appear. The description of what was bought is the one written by the town hall; where it is missing, the name of the CPV code (the EU’s procurement classification) is shown. A firm’s figures are those filed by the firm and the town hall; an error there is corrected at ANAF or in SEAP, and the page is rebuilt from those sources at each update.

Sources#

1. Public purchases: ADR, the SEAP datasets on data.gov.ro (direct purchases, award notices, contracts, 2023–2026), licence OGL-ROU-1.0.
2. Company accounts: Finance Ministry, financial statements for 2023, 2024 and 2025, licence OGL-ROU-1.0; per-firm checks through the ANAF web services (accounts, VAT register and registration date).
3. Trade register: ONRC, registered companies (registered office), licence OGL-ROU-1.0.
4. Town halls and population: 2021 census (INS) and the list of administrative units; commune outlines: geo-spatial.org, CC BY-SA 4.0.
5. CPV code names: Regulation (EC) No 213/2008.