The Security and Information Service (SIS) will move to a new building and its name will be changed into the National Information Service. SIS director Mihai Balan, who presented in Parliament the strategy for reforming the institution for 2014 – 2018, said that both the legal framework on the service’s organization and the whole activity will be reformed. The cost of the reform is 144 million lei, IPN reports.

“Four years is only the first stage of the reform. It can be updated and there may be introduced new mechanisms,” said Mihai Balan.

According to him, the current head office does not meet the criteria of a special service as everyone knows it. The building may serve as a museum for exhibiting materials explaining the work of the NKVD, KGB and the SIS.

The Communist opposition criticized the draft strategy. “It is a formal, sterile strategy that will not lead to the modernization of the service. Regardless of what is written in the document, everything depends on the service’s employees who must be motivated to be patriots,” said Artur Reshetnikov, of the Communist faction.

The government coalition backed the bill. The lawmakers expressed their confidence that this strategy will eliminate the sovietism and communism and will contribute to the country’s Europeanization.

The strategy for reforming the SIS aims to ensure the institution’s independence and to improve its institutional capacities. It also defines the powers of the head of state in coordinating the work of the institution and in creating a special parliamentary commission that will monitor the work of the SIS.