Contradictory declarations about requesting SSN

The President of the National Institute of Statistics, Virgil Voineagu, declared that the NIS spokesperson, Vladimir Alexandrescu, had been fired from his job after declaring on Saturday that giving the Social Security number to the censors was not compulsory.

The NIS President, Virgil Vioneagu, pointed out during a press conference that providing the Social Security number to the censors is mandatory.

The NIS official added that, therefore, the censors must return to the homes of those already censored and obtain the Social Security number from the persons who initially refused to give it.

The citizens are obliged to give their Social Security number to the censors, as it is shown in a press release issued on Tuesday by NIS, after the spokesman for the institution stated on Saturday that disclosing the Social Security number was not mandatory.

Otherwise, citizens who do not offer these pieces of information risk paying a fine between 1,500 and 4,500 lei.

Both the National Institute of Statistics and the Interior Ministry say that there is a legal basis for collecting the Social Security number and assure the population that the census data will be treated confidentially by the census authorities and will not be used in any other purposes than for statistics.

The spokesperson for the National Institute of Statistics, Vladimir Alexandrescu said on Saturday that the persons who refused to declare their Social Security number at the census could be registered without it and did not risk being sanctioned.

“No one is obliged to tell their Social Security number to the censor if for one reason or another they do not want to do it. Anyone can and will be censored even in the absence of the Social Security number, and those who refuse to tell it to the censor do not risk any sanction at all”, Vladimir Alexandrescu declared at a press conference on Saturday.

All the questions included in the census forms are mandatory, except for the optional ones related to ethnicity, religious orientation, mother tongue, and any disabilities, as it is reminded in the press release issued by NIS.

After five days over four million houses and almost ten million persons have been censored.

The census will end on 31 October and the first data will be made public at the latest in January 2012.

The strategy elaborated concerning the Population and Housing Census is designed to extend the general background of information that characterises the evolution over time of families, including that of households, which are basic components of human interaction.

Translated by: VioletaMavrodin
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University