The Romanian Banking Association informed the supervisory authority that this association together with Biroul de Credit analysed and established a procedure for reporting and informing natural persons what will benefit from the rights conferred by law on debt discharge (Law no. 77/2016) and also for informing the bank by the clients.

Thus, RBA informed us that it established the following: “The client will be reported to Biroul de Credit with the status account registered at the date of the notification and with the following mention “notification debt discharge””.

In view of the adverse consequences that the individual concerned may have, as a result of the transmission of this information to the Biroul de Credit, the supervisory authority considers as very important to inform the data subject prior to reporting.

Moreover, informing the person concerned is required also in terms of the information to be provided the individual and also to later exercise the other rights such as: right of access to data, the right of intervention upon data (including rectification), right to objects. In this regard, for example, in the case of inaccurate data, reported by credit institutions, the person concerned may make use of the rights guaranteed by Law no. 677/2001, including the one to lodge a complaint to the supervisory authority.

It is important to inform the individuals before there are reported because, after the transmission of the data by a credit institution to Biroul de Credit, the information referring to a certain debtor are retained for a period of 4 years and are available to the credit bureau (which carries out a scoring individual analysis based on this information) and also to all the other participants (financial and loan institutions). The later ones, at their turn, took over and use the information when analyzing the risk and solvency degree of the data subjects (for example when applying for a new loan).

In the absence of such information, the data subject would not know about the reporting and would, consequently, get in a situation where it would not have knowledge about the fact that he may require the deletion or the correction of the data sent to Biroul de Credit.

As a consequence, in order to ensure adequate information and efficient protection of the rights of the reported persons, the supervisory authority considers to be necessary the prior notice of the data subject within 15 calendar days before transmitting the data to Biroul de Credit, according to Article 8 (2) of Decision no. 105/2007.