Armenia’s Mandatory Whistleblowing Procedures for Employers (HO-346-N)

Armenian private employers with more than 250 employees have been required to operate a confidential internal whistleblowing procedure since 3 August 2026, the date law HO-346-N entered into force, and the same duty reaches employers with more than 50 employees on 1 January 2028. The law amends Armenia’s 2017 Law on the Whistleblowing System (HO-97-N), which until now applied mainly to state and local government bodies. For HR directors and general counsel, the immediate question is which side of the headcount line the company sits on, and the answer is set by last year’s payroll averages.

Who must comply, and when

Two tiers apply. Until 31 December 2027 the duty falls on private employers with 251 or more employees. From 1 January 2028 it extends to employers with 51 or more employees, which brings a large share of Armenia’s mid-sized companies into scope in a single step.

The count is a headcount, not full-time equivalents. It is calculated as the average of month-end employee counts across the complete months of the preceding calendar year. A company that averaged 268 employees across 2026 is covered for 2027 even if it has since dropped below 251, and a company that crossed 251 in June 2027 does not become covered until the 2027 average is struck.

There is no transition period for employers. The one-year window written into the law runs to the Government, which has that period to issue implementing regulations. Covered employers were given no equivalent grace, so the obligation has been live since August 2026 while secondary rules are still being drafted.

The people who may use the channel are drawn more widely than the payroll. Current and former employees, contractors, individuals who receive the organisation’s services, and people mistakenly believed to have made a report all fall within the protected class. Whether a job applicant who reports during recruitment is covered is not resolved by the enacted text.

The enacted text contains no rule aggregating headcount across affiliated companies under common control, no rule setting whether a branch of a foreign company counts its Armenian staff or its worldwide staff, and no deeming rule attributing employer-of-record staff to the client company. No official guidance has been published on any of the three, and no Armenian court has yet ruled on them. Companies structured as corporate groups, foreign branches, or employer-of-record arrangements should treat their exposure as open until the Government’s implementing regulations address it. State-owned commercial companies received no blanket exemption; their position turns on how the individual entity is constituted. The calculation for an entity formed part-way through a calendar year, with no full preceding year to average, is likewise unaddressed.

What the internal procedure must contain

The procedure has to name a responsible officer and publish that officer’s contact details so a potential reporter can find them without asking a manager. From there the law imposes fixed clocks:

• 1 working day from receipt to register the report.
• 3 working days from registration to open proceedings, where grounds exist.
• 30 days as the maximum duration of the investigation.
• 3 days from the decision to notify the whistleblower of the outcome.

Those deadlines are the practical reason a covered employer cannot rely on an informal open-door policy. A report arriving on a Friday afternoon has to be logged by the following Monday, and a decision on whether to investigate is due three working days after that.

Handling reports internally does not require the employee’s separate written consent to process their personal data. The designated officer’s processing rests on its own statutory basis under the whistleblowing law, which sits outside Armenia’s general written-consent requirement for personal data. Whether the channel must also accept fully anonymous reports is not settled in the enacted text, so employers building a system now should design for confidentiality of identity and keep an anonymous intake option open as a configuration choice.

The internal channel sits alongside the external routes that already existed. Armenia operates a state whistleblowing platform, and civil-society bodies run their own reporting services. An internal procedure does not displace those, and a worker who prefers an external route keeps it.

For most Armenian employers the subject is familiar and the legal character has changed. Internal investigation rules have generally lived in the company’s Internal Labor Rules as recommended practice. For covered employers, a whistleblowing-specific version of that content is now a statutory requirement carrying its own deadlines and its own fine. Our employment compliance work starts from the existing Internal Labor Rules document, since that is usually where the gap shows up.

Anti-retaliation protection and remedies

The prohibited conduct is framed as “harmful actions”, a deliberately non-exhaustive category. Dismissal is the obvious case, and the term also captures demotion, cuts to salary or bonus, disciplinary sanctions, and adverse omissions such as withholding a promotion or a training place that would otherwise have followed.

The burden of proof sits with the defendant employer. That allocation is not new in August 2026; it has been in the whistleblowing law since 2017 and now applies to a far larger population of employers. In practice the employer has to show that the adverse decision would have been taken anyway, on grounds unconnected to the report, and has to show it with documentation created at the time.

Remedies come from two directions. The whistleblowing law requires restoration of the affected labour rights together with compensation for damage. Where the retaliation took the form of dismissal, the Labor Code route under Article 265 also runs: reinstatement plus pay for the period of forced idleness, or compensation of one to twelve times average salary where reinstatement is not possible. The nine-month ceiling that employers often cite applies only where the employee found other work during the forced absence, in which case compensation is limited to nine months of previous salary plus any positive salary difference. The filing window for a dismissal claim is two months from receipt of the dismissal order.

HO-346-N did not add whistleblower status to the list of protected categories in Labor Code Article 114, which continues to cover pregnancy, sick leave, employees on leave and the other established groups. Protection for a reporter runs through the whistleblowing law itself. Nor did the amendment create a whistleblower-specific criminal offence for the officer who signs the dismissal; the general criminal provisions on interference with lawful activity remain the only route to personal liability.

Penalties and who enforces them

Enforcement runs through the Code of Administrative Offences, Article 41.5, which carries two bands. The first sets a fine of AMD 100,000 to AMD 200,000 (approximately USD 253 to USD 506). The second sets a fine of AMD 300,000 to AMD 400,000 (approximately USD 760 to USD 1,013).

The procedural path matters as much as the amounts. The police prepare the administrative protocol and the Administrative Court decides the case. The Health and Labor Inspection Body, which handles most labour-law supervision in Armenia and issues its own fines, has no role in these particular offences. An employer expecting the familiar labour-inspection process will be dealing with a different authority and a court file.

Whether a fine can be imposed on a covered employer that simply has no procedure in place, where no report has yet been made and no one has been harmed, is not settled by the text. Enforcement practice will answer it, and there is none yet on a law this recent.

Frequently asked questions

What to do next, by threshold

Employers already above 250 are late, and the exposure is a court-imposed fine, so the sequence should be compressed:

1. Calculate the 2025 and 2026 month-end averages and record the working, since that calculation is the first thing an inspector or a court will ask to see.
2. Appoint the responsible officer by name and publish the contact details on an internal page workers can reach without going through a line manager.
3. Build the register that timestamps receipt, registration, the proceedings decision and the outcome notice, because the four deadlines are measured against those entries.
4. Amend the Internal Labor Rules so the whistleblowing procedure is part of the approved document set and communicated to staff.
5. Brief managers that adverse decisions affecting anyone who has filed a report will be assessed with the burden of proof on the company.

Employers between 51 and 250 employees have until 1 January 2028, and their calculation will be struck on the 2027 month-end averages. A company projecting growth through 2027 should plan on the basis that its 2027 average determines the position, which puts the practical decision point in early 2027.

Last updated: 27 August 2026