December compresses the administration’s systemic bottlenecks into a few weeks. Regardless of the institution – the city hall, tax offices, community services, utility providers – the final month of the year produces a structural slowdown, not an incidental one. The pace shifts because the administration is forced to handle mandatory internal procedures, reduced staffing, and a high volume of requests that cannot be postponed.

The first factor is the year-end accounting closures and mandatory financial reporting. Departments must finalize payments, reconciliations, and financial statements before December 31, which redirects a significant portion of staff toward internal work. The effect is a noticeably longer waiting time for public-facing operations, including basic tasks such as filing a document or obtaining a certificate.

The second element is the minimal staffing level. December concentrates unused vacation days, compensatory time off, and personnel rotations that reduce, sometimes by more than a third, the operational capacity of counters and technical offices. The institutions do not shut down completely, but they function with diminished teams, turning any request into a slow process dependent on the few employees available.

Added to this is the end-of-year deadline for several categories of local taxes and administrative notifications. Individuals and companies try to close their own financial records before year-end, increasing pressure on sector tax departments and on services handling contracts, authorizations, or changes of ownership. The volume of documents doubles, and institutions can adjust the pace only by extending processing times.

Overlapping vacations create chain blockages between institutions. A delayed approval from one department stalls the next step in the process, and this delay propagates until the final submission. This produces waiting periods that, in any other month, would be unjustifiable.

Finally, the relationship with the public is affected by a constant December pattern: internal tasks are prioritized over new requests. Online systems remain available, but processing follows the same slow rhythm because it depends on the same staff allocated to closing the financial year.

December is not slow because the administration performs poorly, but because it operates at reduced capacity at a moment of maximum demand. Bucharest’s bureaucracy reveals, in this month, the limits of its structure: a fragile, overstretched system that cannot redistribute resources efficiently when pressure increases.