Live data from Hacker News

Proposed Tax Reform Stands to Impact Equity and Performance-Based Compensation

fenwick.com

111–116 of 116 posts

Re: Proposed Tax Reform Stands to Impact Equity and Performance-Based Compensation

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMT will be gone Trump is doing this to help himself. I read somewhere that he got hit pretty bad on AMT recently.

Let's avoid making the same mistakes the right always makes, namely assuming the worst of people, and always assuming financial motives for peoples' actions. Trump reducing the AMT for himself seems somewhat unlikely, because: = The plan(s) are written by the House and Senate, not the administration. - he doesn't seem to have given any relevant input to these tax plans except asking for lower corporate tax rate (whic…

Let's avoid making the same mistakes the right always makes, namely assuming the worst of people

This made me chuckle. You're basically telling people to not do what you just did.

Re: Proposed Tax Reform Stands to Impact Equity and Performance-Based Compensation

#112
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taxes are just too darn complicated! While I understand this sentiment, I feel that a complicated tax code (or legal code in general) is just where countries end up going as they become larger and more important in the day-to-day lives of its citizens. All the various financial situations in this country are incredibly complicated. Perhaps we should take a similar route as public defenders (not in practice but in t…

The problem is that TurboTax lobbies against this. Basically, they benefit from our current system. That's why proposal for things like the IRS filling out your taxes for you are illegal. Really, what should happen is that the IRS mails you your taxes already filled out, you check for errors and fill in the things that aren't reported, and mail it back. This would kill TurboTax's business, so they lobby against it.

So the solution isn't to nerf the existing tax code, but instead to elect representatives that are actually looking out for their electorate instead of companies like TurboTax.

Re: Proposed Tax Reform Stands to Impact Equity and Performance-Based Compensation

#113
post #96
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...has to wait for everyone alive to die..." Certainly not. It's all based on the purchase/exercise/offering date. Let's take it to the extreme: if homicide had been legal, and society decided we needed to outlaw it, it stands to reason that homicide committed before the law was enacted would not be prosecuted, but only those cases happening one or after that date.

A homicide law isn't ambiguous. Either you killed the dude before it was enacted or after. You know, to the second, whether or not you're a murderer. Tax law isn't so clear. There's when you were granted the shares, when you acquired them (which may or may not be a taxable event, depending, among other things, on whether there's a spread between strike price and FMV), when you sold them (which is a taxable event), an…

Homicide is a little more ambiguous than that, because it's quite possible to fatally injure someone who lingers in hospital for a month.

Re: Proposed Tax Reform Stands to Impact Equity and Performance-Based Compensation

#114
post #87
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISOs are priced at the 409a value, which can be 1/10th of the preferred share price. Generally speaking, the 409a value converges with the preferred price as the company is de-risked and moves closer to IPO.

The caps are based on the value of the ISO when it vests , not when it is granted. If you exceed the $100K limit, then the options revert to NQs (and would presumably be subject to retroactive withholding, under the new rules). This will hit companies that are within a few years of IPO particularly hard, since right now, they can use stock incentives as a significant recruitment tool, and large, unknown, multipliers…

If I vote for a state government that maintains higher state taxes, why should that decrease what I owe to the nation? Am I getting less benefit from the federal government? Also, those states can always lower their taxes in the future.

Re: Proposed Tax Reform Stands to Impact Equity and Performance-Based Compensation

#115
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A homicide law isn't ambiguous. Either you killed the dude before it was enacted or after. You know, to the second, whether or not you're a murderer. Tax law isn't so clear. There's when you were granted the shares, when you acquired them (which may or may not be a taxable event, depending, among other things, on whether there's a spread between strike price and FMV), when you sold them (which is a taxable event), an…

Homicide is a little more ambiguous than that, because it's quite possible to fatally injure someone who lingers in hospital for a month.

No, it's really not. The action that put the person in the hospital where they lingered for a month before dying either happened when it was legal to homicide, or not. Without that specific action, the victim would not be dead — or, more specifically, would not be in a situation that led to their death.

Criminal law absolutely recognizes that causal chains have a "first link", without which the rest of the chain wouldn't even have happened. It also specifically subjects the party causal to that first link to special scrutiny.

Re: Proposed Tax Reform Stands to Impact Equity and Performance-Based Compensation

#116
post #68

At least at my employer, the deferred compensation plan is only offered to high-level management employees ("Director" and above). So this doesn't seem to be a great loss for the average engineer. If other people who are individual contributors, or even low level managers, have access to an employer deferred compensation plan (different from my experience), I would love to hear about it. (As a highly paid engineer, I…

At least one of AmaFooBookSoftLe offers deferred comp to all employees.

Which one(s)?
Post reply on HN