New legislation regulating the electronic meal voucher in Romania

The law for the amendment and supplement of Law no. 142/1998 on granting of meal vouchers (the Amending Law) has been adopted by the Chamber of Deputies on 15 October 2013 and is pending promulgation by the president of Romania (the step required to give legal effect to a bill).

The Amending Law contains specific provisions regulating the introduction of the new electronic meal voucher (EMV). The provisions are the result of vivid debates involving the issuers of printed meal vouchers, employers, trade unions, banks and other financial institutions. Such debates have been mainly focused on the legal regime of the EMV - initially envisaged as a bank card, but is presently regulated as an electronic voucher with limited use - as well as on the legal and technical consequences arising thereof.

The main changes provided by the Amending Law are summarised below:

A. Specific provisions regulating EMVs

Similarly to the printed meal voucher, the EMV constitutes a social benefit granted by the employers to their employees and may be used exclusively as meal allowance (i.e. for paying for meals or buying food products within a limited network of traders). This removes the potential qualification of the EMV as e-money under EU and/or domestic legislation.

Additionally, according to the Amending Law, the authorisation procedure to be undergone by the entities intending to issue EMVs is similar to the one applicable for the issuers of printed meal vouchers, with the Ministry of Finance being the authorising authority. However, the sphere of issuers of EMVs may also include banks and non-banking financial institutions, which have not been involved in the issuing of printed meal vouchers so far.

Whilst the EMV will co-exist with the printed meal voucher under the amended Law no. 142/1998, the EMV is defined by the following distinctive features:

• the amounts representing the value of the EMVs to which each employee is entitled shall be transferred to the respective employee by the issuers of the EMVs and not by the employers (the employers provide the printed meal vouchers);
• the EMV allows for the debit of the price of the acquired foods, irrespective of whether such price represents a full/multiple of the value of an EMV (for the printed meal vouchers, only the full value of one voucher or a multiple of the value of one voucher could be used at once);
• it does not allow for cash withdrawals from an ATM, in contrast with a bank card.

B. Amendments applicable to both types of meal vouchers

The main changes provided under the Amending Law and applicable for both printed meal vouchers and EMVs consist of the following:

• neither printed meal vouchers nor the value of EMVs may be transferred to the employees unless the employers have paid the following in full to the issuers: (i) the value of the vouchers acquired by the employers; and (ii) the costs related to the issuance of the respective vouchers;
• the previous restriction, which limited an employee to using a maximum of two meal vouchers per day, has been removed;
• each employer shall decide on the type of meal voucher to grant to its employees, subject to consultations with the employees’ representatives or with the trade unions, as applicable.

The Amending Law shall enter into force within 3 months of its publication in the Official Gazette of Romania, the latter being subject to promulgation of the Amending Law by the president of Romania. Within 5 months after such publication, the Ministry of Labor, Family, Social Protection and Elderly and the Ministry of Public Finance should issue application norms outlining the process of implementing the Amending Law, which should shed light on the various challenges raised by the amended legislation. The new application norms may address issues such as the concrete means by which the employees are to comply with their obligation to return their unused EMV funds to their employers at the end of each month, or specific mechanisms envisaged for enforcing the new legal provisions.