The importance of a project level risk management methodology for EU Structural and Investment Funds accession in Romania

Accessing EU funds is considered to be an important development chance for all type of beneficiaries in Romania: public bodies, nongovernmental organizations and firms. The grounds for this are the amount of funds available per beneficiary and the co financing rate (for example, the investment projects for firms amounted up to 5 million Euro of EU funding at a EU co financing rate up to 70%). As the Romanian responsible authorities strive to conduct a fast and smooth process, the reality shows the funds accession is rather unpredictable and costly, both in terms of time consumption and financial resources. Lots of causes contribute to this situation, amongst which the inefficient risk management conducted, both by the state authorities responsible with the EU funds management and by the beneficiaries of funds. The effects are visible: a poor absorption rate of the EU structural and cohesion funds (79,23% at the level of January 2017 for the 2007-2013 financial period). The authors' research follows the importance that risk management should have in the process of managing and accessing EU funds. The research methodology starts from the responses that 170 people involved in managing EU funded projects within 2007-2013 financial period gave to an online questionnaire carried on in 2016. The focus was to establish if and how risk management methodologies/procedures/guidelines were used within the implementation of projects and in what measure this kind of approach should be compulsory or optional for the financial period 2014-2020. The research methodology further implied the analysis of key issues for projects financing such as: feasibility and opportunity determination, budgeting, projects' evaluation, etc. The main finding of the research is that applicants and beneficiaries need to implement project level risk management methodologies. Based on this, the authors propose a guideline for drafting project level risk management methodologies, that put into practice might increase predictability during the preparation and implementation and reduce the additional costs of the EU funded projects. It is envisaged that this guideline should be treated as recommendation in order not to enable abuse of regulatory actions from the part of the managing authorities.