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Incentive Stock Options Essay

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Since the late 1980 's more and more people have been given the opportunity to purchase stock options. As of 2001, ten million employees have chosen to purchase stock options. Another survey established that 97 of the top 100 e-commerce companies gave the choice of options this year. For these reasons, it is important to understand what stock options are, the different types of options, and their advantages and disadvantages. A stock option gives any employee the right to buy a certain number of shares in the company at a fixed price for a certain number of years. Employees who have been given the choice of stock options hope that the share price will go up and that they will be able to cash in by purchasing the stock at the …show more content…

For these reasons incentive stock options have been used as a way to obtain employees at lower wages (Franklin and Stevenson, 2). There is a clear problem with incentive stock options that may seem hidden amidst all the benefits. The alternative minimum tax is the flaw with incentive stock options. The article "Tax Attack" states that this tax is "…a parallel tax system created more than 30 years ago to ensure that everyone pays something to the IRS… it was never indexed to keep pace with inflation" (Franklin and Stevenson, 1). A person pays the alternative minimum tax instead of income taxes when the tax bill that results from the alternative minimum tax is higher than it would be under regular income taxes. The alternative minimum tax differs from regular income taxes because it taxes the spread of incentive stock options and does not allow a person to deduct things such as state income taxes, property taxes, and exemptions for oneself and his dependents among other things. The one benefit is that the taxes paid on the spread can be used as a credit in future years to offset income taxes (Franklin and Stevenson, 2). In the article "Tax Attack," Angela Hartley, 48, owes $360,000 in taxes due to her purchasing of incentive stock options. This is because she is being taxed as though she had sold the stock for one million dollars. She actually still holds the stock today and its value is no where near this amount.

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