Setting Up an SPV Account: Romania's Online Tax Portal for Foreign Employees and Employers

Spatiul Privat Virtual, generally referred to as SPV, is the online portal Romania's tax authority, ANAF, uses for almost all communication with taxpayers: tax decisions, notices, declarations, certificates, and payment records all move through it rather than through paper correspondence. For a foreign employee starting work in Romania, and for the employer managing their file, getting an SPV account set up correctly, and early, avoids a surprisingly common bottleneck: documents that ANAF considers legally delivered the moment they appear in SPV, whether or not anyone has actually logged in to read them.

Why SPV matters for a foreign hire specifically

Since 1 March 2022, SPV use has been mandatory for companies, associations, and individuals carrying out independent economic or liberal-professional activity in Romania. Paper filings sent instead of an SPV submission are, in ANAF's own framing, simply not taken into account. For an employer, that means payroll filings, employer certificates, and fiscal correspondence tied to a foreign employee's case run through SPV by default, not as an alternative channel.

For the employee, an individual SPV account is where ANAF issues a Romanian tax identification number confirmation, where tax residency documentation gets requested and tracked, and where notices relevant to a Declaratia Unica filing or a tax residency certificate application appear. A foreign national who has a Romanian personal numeric code, a CNP, or has been issued a fiscal identification number, a NIF, in its absence, can use either identifier to register the individual-level account.

Registering an individual account

The individual registration path is free and fully online, and does not require a paid digital certificate. The applicant provides their CNP or NIF, full name and identity document details, sets a username, password, and security question, and uploads a scanned or photographed copy of their identity document. ANAF then offers several ways to confirm the applicant's identity before activating the account:

• Remote video identification, booked within ten days of submitting the registration, where the applicant completes a short verification call and answers basic fiscal questions
• Confirmation by document number, using a reference from a prior ANAF or Ministry of Finance notice, letter, or summons already received, which validates immediately
• Confirmation by decision registration number, using a tax decision issued in 2013 or later, which also validates immediately
• In-person confirmation at any ANAF unit, to be completed within ten days of the online submission

Once identity is confirmed through any of these routes, access is typically activated within two working days, with confirmation sent by email. A separate option, authentication through Romania's ROeID digital identity service, uses a smartphone, a photo of an identity document, a selfie, and a short video, with validation usually completing within one to three days; this authenticates the account but does not itself serve as a signature for documents filed through SPV.

A foreign employee without a CNP will need a NIF before this process can begin in most cases, since the registration form asks for one of the two identifiers. Employers sponsoring a non-EU hire should treat NIF issuance as a step that sits ahead of SPV registration in the overall onboarding sequence, not something to request in parallel once the account process has already started.

Registering a company account

An employer's own SPV presence, tied to its CUI or CIF rather than a CNP, follows a different and more involved path, because filing on a company's behalf requires a qualified digital certificate rather than just identity verification. The employer obtains a certificate from an authorised provider, registers that certificate against each relevant CUI or CIF through ANAF's dedicated form for legal entities, and, once ANAF confirms registration by email, authorises the certificate for filing specific declaration types using form 150. Since 19 September 2025, under ANAF Order no. 2213/2025, forms 150 and 151 can only be submitted online with a qualified certificate; paper submission of these forms is no longer accepted.

Certificates are valid for up to three years. Renewal requires two separate actions: renewing with the certificate provider itself, and separately notifying ANAF through its own renewal channel. Skipping the second step means ANAF continues to treat the certificate as expired even after the provider has issued a renewed one, which can quietly cut off a company's filing access without an obvious warning sign.

What SPV is, and is not, used for

Through an individual or company SPV account, a taxpayer can check outstanding payment obligations and their full tax record, receive and respond to ANAF notices and decisions, file declarations and requests, request tax clearance certificates, download income certificates and filing receipts, request instalment payment plans, and access Romania's e-Factura and e-Transport systems. Local taxes on buildings, land, and vehicles fall outside SPV entirely and are handled separately through a taxpayer's local town hall or the Ghiseul.ro platform.

Building this into the onboarding sequence

For a non-EU hire, the practical sequence that avoids delays runs roughly as follows: secure the employee's NIF or CNP as part of the broader immigration and registration file, open the individual SPV account once that identifier exists, confirm the employer's own company-level SPV and certificate authorisation is current for the declaration types the new hire's payroll will require, and only then begin running payroll filings that depend on both accounts being live. Treating SPV registration as a parallel, lower-priority task rather than a dependency in this chain is the most common reason a case stalls after the immigration side has already cleared.

How Nestlers Group supports employers through this

Nestlers Group's tax team handles tax registration for foreign citizens in Romania, including the SPV account setup itself, so that a new hire's individual tax portal access, and the employer's own filing authorisation, are both confirmed before payroll obligations begin rather than discovered as gaps afterward. Where a case also involves a tax residency certificate, monthly tax liability calculations, or statement submissions, our tax and payroll teams run those through the same SPV-linked file, keeping the online and the underlying compliance work aligned rather than managed as separate threads by separate advisors.

Sources: ContApp, "Spatiul Privat Virtual (SPV) 2026: cum obtii acces pas cu pas, pe CNP si pe CUI"; ANAF Order no. 2213/2025 on the online-only submission of forms 150 and 151, effective 19 September 2025; ANAF guidance on SPV registration for individuals and legal entities.