PTSD After a Workplace Robbery: How to Claim Against the ART

If you were held up during your shift, Argentine law treats it as a workplace accident even if nobody laid a hand on you. Article 6, subsection 1 of Law 24.557 does not require a physical injury: it requires a "sudden and violent event occurring by reason of or on the occasion of work". Your ART (the compulsory workers' compensation insurer) owes you psychological and psychiatric treatment and, if a permanent impairment remains, statutory compensation. Your lawyer is paid by the insurer.

1. Why a robbery is a workplace accident even without injury

Law 24.557 does not require blood. Article 6, subsection 1 defines a workplace accident as "any sudden and violent event occurring by reason of or on the occasion of work". An armed hold-up at the counter, a threatened robbery on a delivery round or a break-in at the shop fit that wording exactly: they are sudden, they are violent, and they happen by reason of or during your work. The psychological harm that follows is a consequence of that accident, covered by the same statute that covers a fracture.

That changes what you have to prove. You do not need to show that your job slowly made you ill, as you would with a repetitive-strain condition. You need to show three things: that the event happened, that it was sudden and violent, and that it occurred through or during work. The police report, the shop's CCTV, the incident log, the company report and your colleagues' statements are the core evidence on that first point.

Once the accident is recognised, the ART has two immediate duties. First, the benefits in kind under article 20 of Law 24.557: medical and pharmaceutical care, prosthetics and orthopaedics, rehabilitation and vocational retraining. Psychological and psychiatric treatment falls squarely inside that list, and article 2 of Law 26.773 is blunt: those benefits "may not be substituted for money", with the sole exception of transporting the patient. The insurer cannot offer you cash instead of your sessions. Second, treatment runs "until complete recovery or for as long as the disabling symptoms persist" (article 20, paragraph 3).

If a permanent impairment remains once treatment is exhausted, that is when the compensation entitlement is born.

2. How the official table rates you: A.S.R., A.S.D. and two scales

In everyday speech you will call it post-traumatic stress. The official impairment schedule uses a different name, and it pays to know it before you sit down at the Medical Board. A new table has applied since 2 February 2026: Decree 549/2025 replaced Annex I of Decree 659/96 and took effect 180 calendar days after publication. Its article 3 matters to you: it applies "to every assessment or determination of work-related impairment not yet issued, regardless of the administrative or judicial stage it is at". So even if your accident predates it, if nobody has fixed your percentage yet, this is the table you will be measured by.

The Psychiatry chapter calls the condition an Abnormal Situational Reaction (Reacción Vivencial Anormal, R.V.A.): by convention, "the anxious and/or depressive condition reactive to the incident, in its first phase". The same condition is renamed Abnormal Situational Development (Desarrollo Vivencial Anormal, D.V.A.) once therapeutic options have been exhausted. And the table adds a rule worth its weight in gold: a definitive impairment may only be fixed once the harm has legally consolidated. In plain terms, if treatment can still improve you, it is not yet time for anyone to put a number on you.

The table also sets a conceptual floor. Subjective psychological distress that cannot be objectively verified and does not impair social or working life generates no impairment at all: it is classed as normal, expected suffering. For an R.V.A. or D.V.A. there must be objectively documented symptoms tied to the event.

The two scales that intersect

The grade does not come from a fixed number per diagnosis. It comes from crossing two variables: the magnitude of the incident and its consequences, and the severity of the psychopathological picture.

On magnitude of the event, the schedule gives examples that matter a great deal in a robbery. It classes as moderate any "aggression by third parties with a firearm or blunt or sharp instruments", and also situations that left no physical injury but "posed a real threat to the person's physical integrity, leaving them vulnerable and defenceless". It classes as severe events lived through with extreme horror, meaning those that threatened the person's life or integrity, or where third parties died. By contrast, it classes as mild interpersonal conflict or aggression by third parties where there was no physical aggression. That is why the account of the event — whether a weapon was present, whether you were held at gunpoint, whether anyone was hurt — is not colour: it sets the scale.

On magnitude of the symptoms, the table distinguishes mild symptoms (psychological treatment required, mild effect on social or working life), moderate (psychological and psychiatric treatment required, one sphere affected or several partially) and severe (functioning across every sphere and personal autonomy severely affected). Hence the importance of arriving with a clinical record: documented treatment, prescribed medication, sick leave, specialist reports.

3. What it pays: the formula, the statutory floor and the 20% add-on

Once permanent partial impairment is fixed, article 14, paragraph 2(a) of Law 24.557 orders a single lump sum: 53 × Monthly Base Income × impairment percentage × (65 ÷ your age) at the date of first disabling manifestation. That formula governs while impairment is 50% or less.

The Base Income is not your last payslip. Under article 12, it is the monthly average of every wage accrued in the year before the first disabling manifestation, with each of those wages indexed month by month by the RIPTE wage index. The full worked calculation is in how ART compensation is calculated.

The formula has a floor that the Workers' Compensation Superintendency (SRT) updates every six months. Under article 2 of SRT Resolution 39/2026 (Official Gazette, 2 September 2026), between 1 September 2026 and 28 February 2027 compensation under article 14, paragraph 2 may not be lower than ARS 114,354,110 multiplied by the impairment percentage. You always receive the higher of the two figures: formula or floor.

On top of that total comes the single-payment add-on of article 3 of Law 26.773, equal to 20%, where "the harm occurs at the workplace or the employee suffers it while at the employer's disposal". That is why a hold-up inside the shop adds the 20% and a hold-up on the way to work, in principle, does not.

4. The Medical Board procedure, step by step

Article 1 of Law 27.348 made the SRT's Jurisdictional Medical Board a compulsory prior administrative stage that excludes any other intervention. No lawsuit starts before it. You may choose the board covering your home address, the place where you actually work, or the place where you habitually report. Here is how representation before the Medical Board works in practice.

1. File immediately: notify the employer and the ART in writing, with as much detail of the event as you can. File the police report too. On timing, see how long you have to notify the ART.
2. Treatment and temporary disability: while you cannot perform your usual duties you are on Temporary Work Disability (article 7). The ART pays a monthly benefit and covers sessions, medication and tests.
3. Free legal representation: a lawyer is compulsory in the procedure, and article 1 of Law 27.348 places the fees "and other expenses incurred by the worker" exclusively on the ART. Article 21, paragraph 4 of Law 24.557 also makes the whole procedure free, including travel and additional tests.
4. The board's deadline: 60 administrative working days from the first properly completed filing (article 3, Law 27.348), extendable for duly reasoned factual issues. Once it expires, the appeal route under article 2 opens.
5. Settlement hearing: the ruling is served and the parties are summoned before the Settlement Service, where the amount is disclosed. If you agree, it is approved and the approval carries administrative res judicata.
6. Payment: sums arising from an approved settlement must be made available to you within five days of service of the approval (Annex I, article 4, Law 27.348) and deposited into your payroll account (article 17). Before that, article 4 of Law 26.773 requires the ART to notify you of the amounts within fifteen days.
7. If you disagree: you may appeal to the Central Medical Board or go straight to the labour court of the jurisdiction where the board sat (article 2, Law 27.348), with your own court-appointed medical expert. Contingency-fee agreements are prohibited in these proceedings.

Two safeguards are worth knowing. If you are discharged and symptoms persist, there is the medical discharge challenge, filed in person before the Medical Board with the accident notice and the discharge certificate (SRT Resolution 179/15, as amended by SRT Resolution 41/22). And if the ART discharged you without recording any impairment, or simply never requested the assessment hearing, you can push the impairment determination yourself from the 21st day counted from the day after temporary disability ends or treatment concludes.

The 2026 reform strengthened the procedure on a point that helps you: article 4 bis of Law 27.348, inserted by article 154 of Law 27.802, requires adhering jurisdictions to apply the impairment schedule strictly and to staff forensic medical bodies with the specialisation these disputes demand.

5. Mistakes that sink the claim

• Not filing a police report: it is the most direct proof that the event was sudden and violent. Without it the ART has room to dispute that it happened as you describe.
• Delaying notice to the ART: the more time passes between the robbery and the formal notice, the easier it is for the insurer to break the link between your current condition and that specific event.
• Accepting discharge while still in the R.V.A. phase: if treatment is unfinished, the schedule itself says definitive impairment is only fixed once the harm has legally consolidated.
• Attending the hearing without your own reports: a clinical record starting close in time to the event supports your case far better than an unsupported account on examination day.
• Signing a voluntary settlement unchecked: Annex I, article 3 of Law 27.348 forbids approving any proposal below what strict application of the statute yields. If they offer less, it cannot be approved.
• Confusing it with workplace bullying: these are different claims with different legal bases and procedures. Framing it wrongly is the shortest route to a rejection.

6. When to consider a civil suit against the employer

Article 75 of the Employment Contract Law imposes a duty of safety on the employer: to adopt "the measures which, according to the type of work, experience and technical knowledge, are necessary to protect the physical and mental integrity and the dignity of workers". If you were robbed in a shop with a history of break-ins where there was never an alarm, cameras or security, that omission is arguable under ordinary civil law.

The Supreme Court opened that door in «Aquino», which allowed full damages above the statutory formula, and in «Torrillo» it extended civil liability to the ART itself where it failed in its prevention duties. That the prior Medical Board stage is compulsory was confirmed in «Pogonza».

Now the warning: article 4 of Law 26.773 makes the choice mutually exclusive. The systems do not stack, and merely starting to collect money or filing suit under one of them already counts as an election made over that event. With one express exception in article 5: drawing the temporary disability benefit or receiving benefits in kind does not count as an election. You can be treated by the ART without burning the civil route; what you cannot do is collect the statutory compensation and then sue over the same event.

Frequently asked questions about PTSD and ART claims