Who controls the activity of foreign worker recruitment and placement agencies?

Romania's current foreign labour legislation no longer appears to cope with current challenges on the labour market.

Iulia Hau, 08.10.2025, 14:00

The activity of recruiting and placing foreign labour is regulated in Romania by Order 25/2014, with its subsequent amendments and additions, but this piece of legislation does not appear to meet all the current needs when it comes to regulating the agents and agencies dealing with the foreigners’ regime in Romania.

According to data from the National Trade Register Office, in August 2025, 7,073 agencies were registered under the classification allowing them to to carry out employment placement activities, up from 5,074 in 2020. However, recent journalistic investigations have shown that many other companies carry out these activities without being registered as doing so. At this moment, anyone, regardless whether they have the required training, competence or ethics, can handle obtaining work permits for foreign workers, who have a short time available to sign an employment contract. Foreign workers who have just arrived in Romania have 15 working days to do this, and when changing employers, they have 90 days from the conclusion of their last contract.

Taking advantage of these tight deadlines and the pressure faced by foreign workers to avoid becoming illegal residents, the agencies or individuals who submit their files for them to the General Inspectorate for Immigration can charge enormous fees for contracts that are often unfavourable to the workers. In the absence of a coherent legislative framework to regulate such essential bureaucratic processes regarding the situation of foreigners in Romania, abuses, corruption and fraud have flourished unhindered.

Silvia Tăbușcă, an expert in human trafficking, says that, after Romania’s entry into Schengen, these agencies have started charging even more:

“First of all, recruitment companies, according to international regulations, are not allowed to take money from the employee. So only the employer can pay a recruitment agency, not the recruited person. But this is not respected. Recruitment agencies in Romania work with and share the money with the recruitment agencies in the workers’ countries of origin and the agency in the country of origin charges an amount of money, which is sometimes quite large, because people actually pay bribes to ensure that they get a job in the European Union.”

The expert believes that these agencies are mainly responsible for the illegal residence of foreign workers.
“My feeling is that for years, at political level and when it comes to certain people, enormous amounts of money have been made at the expense of people who sometimes end up losing their homes, their lives, their mental health because of unfulfilled promises made by recruitment agencies. They are the first to blame, in my view, followed by employers. I have looked at many cases. Employers are advised by recruitment agencies on how to act, sometimes even to deny them legal status so that they can pay them lower salaries than what was initially negotiated.”

The expert explains that when foreign workers lose their legal status, that’s to the advantage of recruitment agencies, because the annual quota of migrant workers is not reached. Thus, the agencies can bring in more people from abroad, from whom they collect new amounts of money. Tăbușcă believes that there is a need for greater transparency in the entire recruitment process, because there are suspicions of corruption both among the authorities and the recruitment agencies, both in Romania and the workers’ countries of origin. She also believes that the process, as it is now, is conducive to corruption and human rights violations:

“I’m advocating for transparency in the entire system, so that foreign workers should also be able to track down the documents that have been submitted on their behalf, whether they have been submitted or not by employers within 30 days, and if employers did not do so the foreign workers can do something about it, challenge the process, write to the Immigration department, complain that their documents were not submitted by the employers, as promised etc. There should be a permanent discussion.”

A number of experts believe that Romania has filed as many return decisions as possible to prove that it is dealing with illegal migration and that it meets the conditions to enter and remain in the Schengen area. Meanwhile, foreigners who pay money for placement services and due diligence in order to obtain work permits find themselves in illegal situations or in working conditions that do not comply with the Romanian labour legislation, ending up doing 12-13-hour shifts per day, night shifts that are not properly paid, often working illegally and without the right to stay and not even knowing it. Experts say it is time for the authorities to establish some standards in the field of recruitment. It is time for the activity of these agencies and agents to be controlled and regulated, especially since the victims of irregularities, the foreign citizens, also have to deal with the language barrier and the difficulty of understanding the legislative framework.

The General Inspectorate for Immigration argues that foreigners must know that their main obligation is to remain on the territory of the Romanian state as long as they are allowed to under the visa or residence permit issued by the authorities. According to the Romanian legislation, the request for obtaining an employment permit belongs to the employer. What is important is how serious the employers are in contractual relations, the Inspectorate’s representatives said. The latter distance themselves from any improper and illegal actions, pointing out that when the situation required it, prosecutors were notified regarding possible corruption or migrant trafficking. Between 2022 and 2024, the Inspectorate made six such notifications for possible offences. The General Inspectorate for Immigration and the General Anticorruption Directorate have constantly carried out counselling and corruption prevention activities within their subordinate bodes, the representatives of the General Inspectorate for Immigration also said.