Employee Ownership Blog

Japan's National Tax Administration is seeking a criminal indictment of a former Microsoft executive for failure to report option income. Under Japanese law, individuals working for foreign companies must pay income tax both when they acquire options and when they exercise.

In Harrison v. NetCentric Corp. (433 Mass 465, 2001), an employee and founder of NetCentric was forced to sell his unvested pre-IPO restricted stock back to the company when his employment was terminated.

Most members of the International Accounting Standards Board favor an international standard that would require companies to show the cost of options as a charge against current income, much as the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) proposed to do in the 1990s.

An unpublished IRS private letter ruling has concluded that an S corporation ESOP can make a distribution of company stock to a participant's Individual Retirement Account (IRA) without breaking the S election.

Under a new Irish law, the spread on stock options that are available to all employees on similar terms (with the exception that up to 30% can be made available to key employees certified by an audit to be essential to the company) will now be taxed at only 20% instead of 42%.

Stock options qualified under requirements of French law are now eligible for improved tax treatment.

The tax cut legislation passed by Congress and about to be signed into law (H.R. 1836) has incorporated a revised version of the Comprehensive Retirement Income Security Act (S. 742, H.R. 10) as part of its income tax reduction legislation.

The Senate-passed tax cut legislation has incorporated a revised version of the Comprehensive Retirement Income Security Act (S. 742) as part of its income tax reduction legislation. The tax bill incorporates just about all of S.

The Senate-passed version of the tax bill would provide minor relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) by allowing the enhanced child credit to be claimed against the AMT. Refundable tax credits would no longer be disallowed as well under AMT calculations.

In Scribner v. WorldCom, Inc. (9th Cir., No. 99-35239), the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Donald Scribner, am executive at WorldCom, could exercise the unvested options he was holding at the time of his termination because he was terminated without cause.

One of the most contentious stock options issues is whether unvested options should be included in marital property in divorce settlements. In Fisher v. Fisher (Pa. No. 170, 4/25/01), the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that they were.

Nikolay Butvin, a former employee of DoubleClick, sued the company for fraud on the grounds that it had promised him 13,000 shares to come work there, but that he was only able to exercise 25% of them because he was not fully vested when terminated. In Butvin v. DoubleClick Inc. (S.D.N.Y.