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On November 13, Business Insider took its readers on a virtual tour of Wawa

The NCEO is conducting a survey of equity compensation practices in closely held companies. If your company provides stock options, phantom stock, stock appreciation rights, restricted stock, or similar awards to one or more employees, we hope you can take our new, brief survey on this issue.

Does your company talk about employee ownership?

Aside from the Subchapter S and section 133 provisions of H.R. 3448 described in the last update, the small business tax relief bill working its way through Congress contains other important provisions affecting employee ownership as well.

The tax bill now before the Senate, and the bill that passed the House, contain no provisions directly affecting ESOPs, nor do they contain previous provisions that would have taxed stock awards at vesting.

On October 6, the House approved a House-Senate conference committee's compromise language on the massive 650-page American Jobs Creation Act tax bill. The bill appears likely to pass the Senate either by mid-October or when Congress returns for a lame-duck post-election session.

On October 22, 2004, the President signed the American Jobs Creation Act tax bill. The bill contains several changes important to S corporation ESOPs and to equity compensation plans.

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.

The Republican tax proposal released on November 1 does not contain provisions that will directly affect ESOPs. There had been some concern that the plan would make changes to retirement plan law, but no significant modifications were proposed.

The 2006 tax bill recently passed by Congress contains a provision allowing individuals who paid the alternative minimum tax (AMT) on the exercise of stock options to take a tax credit of 20% (or, if the original credit is less than $25,000, $5,000 or the full amount of the credit, whichever is l