Zero Bureaucracy: Simplifying administrative tasks for businesses and citizens

The General Secretariat of the Government of Romania is responsible for coordinating public administration reform at the national level.

Romania faced significant inefficiencies across its public services – ranging from services with no digital option at all, requiring citizens to submit the same information to multiple public bodies, to services with digital options that still functioned better in person. Compounding this, the public sector lacked any streamlined system for filtering and simplifying regulation.

The Secretariat needed to identify the ten most bureaucratic public services across seven ministries, simplify and digitalize them, and introduce internationally recognized bureaucracy-reduction methodologies into Romania’s public administration.

Civitta built an integrated mechanism to identify, simplify and digitalize the country’s most burdensome administrative services.

Key activities included:

• Building a full inventory of public services and defining the criteria that make a service “bureaucratic”
• Developing a proprietary algorithm to identify the most bureaucratic services for prioritization
• Conducting stakeholder interviews to map the processes behind each service
• Simplifying processes and procedurally interconnecting the institutions involved
• Digitalizing services on both the back-end and front-end
• Supporting the launch of new services, including user manuals, installation and on-the-job training
• Creating a comprehensive guide for each of three international bureaucracy-reduction methodologies
• Organizing a study visit to Croatia to train Romanian civil servants on these methodologies
• Applying each methodology to existing legislation and drafting new legislative proposals based on the findings

The project delivered three legislative-simplification methodologies and three new simplified laws adopted, trained over 100 civil servants to apply the new methodologies and tools, and produced 10 new simplified, digitalized public services projected to serve more than 1 million beneficiaries – businesses and citizens alike.

It also interconnected more than 20 public-sector institutions, laying a clear framework for further legislative simplification and systemic modernization across Romania’s public administration.

Services Provided:

• Public service inventory and bureaucracy-assessment algorithm design
• Stakeholder mapping and process interviews
• Process simplification and inter-institutional coordination
• Service digitalization (back-end and front-end)
• Methodology development and civil servant training
• Legislative drafting support