Is it legal to move your company to Bulgaria? And what actually happens with ANAF

Is it really legal? Am I doing something borderline?

It's legal — and it's actually a right guaranteed to you by the European treaties. Bulgaria has been an EU member state since 2007. Choosing the country where you keep your company, including because it has lower taxes, is called tax optimisation and is perfectly legitimate, as long as your activity is real. It's not a loophole — it's freedom of establishment, one of the pillars of the European single market, written in black and white in Article 49 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU for short). The text says plainly:

"Freedom of establishment shall include the right to take up and pursue activities as self-employed persons and to set up and manage undertakings […] under the conditions laid down for its own nationals by the law of the country where such establishment is effected."

In plain terms: as a citizen of one member state, you have the right to open and run a company in another. That's it.

What makes a company illegal isn't the flag on the door. It's the lie: a company with no activity at all, kept only to shuffle paperwork around. That's the problem — not Bulgaria.

Does ANAF automatically put me on its radar if I open a company there?

No. No red light comes on at ANAF the moment you register an EOOD (a single-member LLC) in Bulgaria. This myth scares a lot of people for nothing.

Let's be precise. Romania's ANAF has no authority in Bulgaria. A company set up properly and cleanly there is a Bulgarian company, under Bulgarian law — it doesn't show up to audits in Romania. The Bulgarian bank isn't obliged to give anyone in Romania information about its clients; if ANAF ever does want data, it has to request it officially from the Bulgarian tax authority, which can in turn ask the bank — but that happens in specific cases, not as routine.

Who does stay under ANAF's eye is you, as a person. You, the shareholder or director, are a Romanian citizen and (usually) tax resident — and you have certain obligations here, such as declaring the dividends you take out. But even those have their limits. Remember this distinction, it's the key: the company is Bulgarian and stays Bulgarian; you, the person, keep your obligations as a Romanian resident. Two different things.

(How tax information flows between states is regulated at European level — the CRS standard and the "DAC6" directive. What exactly applies in your case we'll tell you in a conversation, not on a general page.)

And yet, what does ANAF actually check?

One thing, in essence: where the activity actually takes place.

If the company is in Bulgaria on paper, but you run it entirely from your living room in Bucharest — you make all the decisions here, you work from here, everything happens here — then the Romanian tax authority can say: "in fact, this company is managed from Romania, so we tax it as a Romanian one". Regardless of what the Bulgarian certificate says.

This has a name in law: the "place of effective management" (Tax Code, art. 8¹). If the place where the company's decisions are actually made is Romania, then the company can be considered tax resident here (art. 7) — and taxed as such. There's also the Romania–Bulgaria double taxation treaty (Law 5/1995), which uses the same criterion.

The technical term is "permanent establishment" (or "place of effective management"). The idea, in short: what matters isn't so much where the company is registered, but where it's managed and where the work actually gets done.

How do I prove my Bulgarian company is a real one?

This is everything. And the good news is it isn't complicated. At an audit, what gets looked at — and what you can show — are a few concrete things:

• a real registered office in Bulgaria, not an address shared by five hundred companies;
• contracts and activity that actually happen;
• a Bulgarian bank account that works;
• a Bulgarian phone number.

Honestly? Much beyond that, no one really has a way to check. But these exact things make the difference between a living company and a cardboard one. And this is where we come in: we don't just sell you a certificate, we help you have the real substance that keeps you safe.

Isn't Bulgaria some kind of offshore? Isn't it on a blacklist?

No. And it can't be. Bulgaria isn't an offshore jurisdiction — it's an EU country where the profit tax is 10%. Low taxes don't mean offshore. Offshore lives on secrecy and lack of transparency; Bulgaria plays by exactly the same European reporting rules as Romania. That's why it's on no list of non-cooperative jurisdictions and can't be treated as a tax haven.

The confusion comes from the words: someone searches for an "offshore company", stumbles on Bulgaria, and lumps them together. But with a Bulgarian company you're inside the European Union — same rules, just with gentler taxes.

So if I have a company at an address there, don't I escape taxes?

It's a natural question, and many people have it — the idea that a company at a "post-box" in Bulgaria exempts you from tax, done. It's easy to see why it looks that way. But the truth is a little more nuanced, and it's worth saying gently: a company with no real activity — just an address and a framed certificate — solves nothing for you. On the contrary, it can put you in difficulty, for exactly the reason above (where the activity actually takes place).

The good part is that doing things right isn't hard. We're not talking about "legal vs illegal", but about a company done properly versus one done for show. And the first doesn't ask for much — it just asks for the substance we talked about. That, we build together.