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Canada taxation of employee stock options

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canada taxation of employee stock options

This article discusses the pros and cons of stock options vs shares for employees of Canadian — private and public — companies. The taxation issues are poorly understood and can be very confusing. Current tax regulations can make it difficult for companies to bring new employees and partners in as shareholders. Stock options are a popular way for companies to attract key employees. They are the next best thing to share ownership. Options are also a key part of a compensation package. In larger companies, options contribute substantially — often many times the salary portion — to income. In a recent survey of executive compensation see www. Most of the compensation came from stock options — no wonder the CRA Canada Revenue Agency wants to tax them! Unfortunately, tax law can turn stock options into a huge disincentive in attracting key employees. For exampleif an employee of a company private or public exercises options to buy shares, that employee may have a tax liability even if he sells the shares at a loss. If the company fails, the liability does not disappear. The tax treatment is not the same for Canadian Controlled Private Companies CCPCs as it is for public or non-CCPC companies. CCPCs have an advantage over other Canadian companies. This discussion is applicable to Canadian Controlled Private Companies CCPCs. It addresses how a start-up can best get shares into the hands of employees while being aware of possible tax issues. To employee employees an ownership stake and incentive in the company, the best solution is to give them founders shares just like the founders took for themselves when the company was taxation. Companies should issue founders shares from treasury as early as possible. Some companies issue extra founders shares and hold them in a trust for future employees. Sometimes, the founders will transfer some of their own founders shares to new partners. This is a HUGE benefit. This benefit is the difference between what the employee paid for the shares and their FMV Fair Market Value. This benefit is taxed as regular employment income. For CCPCs, this benefit may be deferred until the shares are sold. However, if the shares are later sold or deemed to have been sold by virtue of a liquidation at a lower price than the FMV at the time of acquisition, the tax on the deferred benefit is STILL DUE. And, although this loss i. It may be possible to claim an ABIL Allowable Business Investment Loss to offset the tax owing on the deferred benefit, i. This may work well if the company is still quite young and has not raised substantial sums from independent investors. In the case of publicly-listed companies, options grants are the norm since FMV can be readily determined — and a benefit assessed — and because regulations often prevent the issuance of zero-cost shares. But for pubcos and non-CCPCs, the tax on these benefits may not be deferred. It is payable in the year in which the option is exercised. This is a real problem for smaller public, venture-listed companies insofar as this tax forces the option to sell some shares just to be the tax! Getting cheap shares into the hands of employees is the best way to go for a CCPC. The only downside risk arises if the company fails in less than two years. See Bottom Line below. If shares instead of options are given at a very low e. To avoid the risk of having to pay the tax on the deferred benefit if shares are issued to an employee below the FMV, options are often granted. This is only a risk if shares are ultimately sold below the FMV, as may be the case in a bankruptcy. Stock options, if unexercised, avoid this potential problem. An option gives one the right to buy a certain number of shares for a stated price the exercise price for a given period of time. The is no liability at the time that options are granted. Only in the year that options are exercised, is there is a tax liability. For CCPCs this liability can be deferred until the shares are actually sold. For example, giving shares at a penny instead of granting options exercisable at 50 cents means that more options must be granted which means greater dilution later when an exit is realized. Taxation amount will go right back to the new owner of the company meanwhile diluting all shareholders participating in the exit! Action item for investors: Give shares instead that are notionally equal to the Black-Scholes value of the option. Example, Joe Blow holds an option to buy K shares at 60 cents. The shares are currently valued at 75 cents based on recent investments. The value of the options is determined to be 35 cents i. The 35 cents is based on the value of the option say 20 cents plus the in-the-money amount of 15 cents. This is better than showing K shares as options on the cap table!! An employee is given an option to buy shares for a penny each. If the employee exercises the option immediately and buys shares, then he is deemed to have received an employment benefit of 99 cents which is fully taxable as income BUT both a DEFERRAL and a DEDUCTION may be available. First, the tax on this income can be deferred until the shares are sold if the company fails, they are considered to be sold. He can mitigate this by claiming an Allowable Business Investment Loss ABIL. In this example, Caution — claiming an ABIL may not work if the company has lost its CCPC status along the way. Their attitude is let CRA challenge it. To determine the number of shares, start by arbitrarily setting the price per share. This could be the most recent price paid by arms-length investors or some other price that you can argue is reasonable under the circumstances. However, he can defer payment of this tax until stock shares are sold. This is why it makes sense to own shares as soon as possible to start the 2-year clock running. He can offset this tax by claiming an ABIL. This is the situation that must be avoided. Make sure you let 2 years pass before liquidating if at all possible. Why bother with options when the benefits of share ownership are so compelling? And the only possible financial risk to an employee getting shares instead of stock options arises in d above if shares are sold at a loss in less than 2 years. If the company fails that quickly, the FMV was likely never very high and besides, you can stretch the liquidation date if you need to. Contractors and consultants are not entitled to the benefit of the deferral. Consequently, employee and consultants will be liable to pay tax upon exercise of any options. Never underestimate the power of the Canada Revenue Agency. One might expect them to chase after the winners — those with big gains on successful exits but what about the folks that got stock options, deferred the benefit and sold their shares for zip? In the case of public companies, stock option rules are different. The main difference is that if an employee exercises an option for shares in a public company, he has an immediate tax liability. Up until the Federal Budget of March 4th,it was possible for an employee to defer the tax until he actually sells the shares. Furthermore, CRA now wants your company to withhold the tax on this artificial profit. This discourages the holding of shares for future gains. If the company is a junior Venture-Exchange listed company, where will it find the cash to pay the tax — especially if it is thinly traded? It is also wrong in that stock options will no longer be an attractive recruiting inducement. Emerging companies will find it much harder to attract talent. It will also be a major impediment to private companies that wish to go public. In the going-public process, employees usually exercise their stock options often to meet regulatory limits on option pools. This could result in a tax bill of millions of dollars to the company. Before the March 4th budget, you could defer the tax on any paper profit until the year in which you actually sell the shares that you bought and get real cash in hand. This was a big headache for those who bought shares only to see the price of the shares drop. The stories you may have heard about Nortel or JDS Uniphase employees going broke to pay tax on worthless shares are true. But when the shares tanked, there was never any cash to cover the liability — nor was there any offset to mitigate the pain. The only relief is that the drop in value becomes a capital loss but this can only be applied to offset capital gains. In the meantime, though, the cash amount required to pay CRA can bankrupt you. CRA argues that the new rule will force you to sell shares right away, thereby avoiding a future loss. You are the CFO of a young tech company that recruited you from Silicon Valley. So much for being an owner! As part of the March 4 changes, CRA will let the Nortel-like victims of the past i. I guess this will make people with deferrals pony up sooner. The mechanics of this are still not well defined. Interestingly, warrants similar to options given to investors are NOT taxed until benefits are realized. Options should be the same. Investors get warrants as a bonus for making an equity investment and taking a risk. Employees get options as a bonus for making a sweat-equity investment and taking a risk. Why should they be treated less favorably? Surely, no Member of Parliament MP woke up one night with a Eureka moment on how the government can screw entrepreneurs and risk takers. What are they thinking? They do see it as a benefit and for them and their employees, it might be better to sell shares, take the profit and run. For smaller emerging companies — especially those listed on the TSX Venture exchange, the situation is different. For one thing, a forced sale into the market can cause a price crash, meaning having to sell even more shares. Managers and Directors of these companies would be seen as insiders bailing out. The rules are complex and hard to understand. The differences between CCPCs, non-CCPCs, public companies and companies in transition between being private and non-private give you a headache just trying to understand the various scenarios. Even while writing this article, I talked to various experts who gave me somewhat different interpretations. Does your head hurt yet? What happens if you do this…or if you do that? I wonder how many MPs know about this tax measure? I wonder if any even know about it. For those who exercised an option before Marchand deferred the benefit, CRA is making a special concession. On the surface it looks simple: You are allowed to file an election that lets you limit your total tax bill to the cash you actually receive when you sell the shares which will likely leave you with nothing for your hard work rather than be subject to taxes on income you never realized as is the case before March The key point in the article is that you have until to decide how to handle any previously deferrals. For example, if there are other capital gains that could be offset, filing the election would result in not being able to offset these. The deemed taxable capital gain will be offset partially or in full by the allowable capital loss arising from the disposition of the optioned share. What is the value of the allowable capital loss that is used, and therefore, not available to offset other taxable capital gains? Your tax accountant might give you a copy. Thanks to Steve Reed of Manning Elliott in Vancouver for his tax insights and to Jim Fletcher, an active angel investor, for his contributions to this article. Generally this means ordinary common shares — BUT — if a Company has a right of first refusal to buy back shares, they may no longer qualify for the same tax treatment. CCPC status may unknowingly be forfeited. Mike — thanks for this very valuable contribution to the community. Options are one of the most common mistakes I see in corporate structures. A couple of additional points:. When companies use options, or vesting stock, they are subject to the stock based compensation rules. This makes the preparation of financial statements much more complicated and expensive. Options are also much more dilutive. That makes the dilution effectively equal between a share or option. But employees consider an option as worth much less than a share. So to get the same incentive, in practice, you have to allocate more options than shares. The additional governance complexity you point out is a consideration. I prefer to make the employee shares a different class with equal economic advantage, but without votes. In the US, options have become so much less desirable that many companies, for example Microsoft, have just stopped using them as a way to motivate the team. It would be interesting to see comments here from some of our friends in the legal and stock professions. They are often the ones advising young companies on this. Your input is options but I am curious about the implications of FMV and the Issuance of extra founders shares set aside in Trust. Are you saying that although I can issue additional founders shares without tax implication, in the beginning, in trust to be issued to new staff at a later date, if I transfer them at a later date they may have serious tax implications? Canada, do these shares even though they have already been issued and all new shareholders would be aware of the dilution factor of those shares, once a major investor comes on board, does the transfer of those shares now represent a benefit and therefore a differed tax presence? If so what would be the point in issuing them in trust. Why not simply issue them. If I am guessing at the reason, it would be because once you have a tangible investor, you have a distinctive FMV and therefore your later issuance of founders shares represents a very real conflict in the interests to your new higher paying shareholders? A trust may be useful in that you would allocate shares in your cap table and all shareholders would regard them as part of the founders block. As a CCPC you can issue shares at any time at any price just make sure you comply with the securities employee. Anyways, is there a maximum percentage of shares that can be issued into trust or is this simply a common sense issue where if you have way too many shares in trust that you will more than likely make some of your early investors a bit concerned about investing in your company with so many shares outstanding? Thanks very much for the super helpful post! I have been trying to figure this all out for the past year, reading so many different articles and sources that left me completely confused. Your article was amazing summary of all the scenarios, written in easy to understand style and will really help me with my venture plans… and also help my students I teach as well in an entrepreneurship class. Mike thank you for your input. But, check with a secuties lawyer. Also, check any tax implications either way. Do these rules apply regardless of the company being public or private? My accountant seems to think so…. Taxation rules are quite different for public vs private companies. They are more favorable to private companies because stock option benefits can be deferred whereas there is no deferral for public companies. It means that, in a public company, you are forced to sell some shares immediately so that you can options the taxes. It discourages ownership which is unfortunate. What are the tax implications for purchase, nominal value transfer or gifting of shares in a CCPC between two shareholders of the CCPC? Thx—this article seems to be one of the best around on this topic. I think it depends on the nature of the transaction and the current value of the shares. If you make a disposition, e. If you give shares to someone in lieu of pay, then they will have to pay tax on the benefit diff between fair value and their cost and you will have to pay tax on the appreciated value. I have vested share options in a private canadian corporation that I VERY recently exercised at a penny a share. The fair market value is 70 cents a share. What happens if say you hold the shares of a CCPC for 1. Do you not get the K tax exemption or the other goodies? Even if you wait another 0. The benefit is that they cost you nothing and will someday, hopefully, be very valuable. The FMV Fair Market Value is what they are worth on the day you get them. Founders shares are usually issued when the company is founded started and at its early stages when partners are brought in to work in the company long before investors are brought in. At this stage, they are usually considered to be of zero value at least for tax purposes. We have recently awarded two employees with share ownership, but everything I can find on CRA web site indicates that such awards are immediately taxable. Specifically CRA bulletin ITR4 provides advice on this — but not about deferrment. If your employer is not a CCPC you may have to report taxable benefits you received in or carried forward to the year you exercise your stock option. BUT… the sentence you quoted: If you get below-cost shares in a QSB regardless of whether they are a gift, a discount, bonus, etc then you have a benefit. This benefit can be defered until you sell the shares. For the first time in many years I have exercised options of a public company. I also have a tremendous amount of carryforward capital losses. I was hoping the the option gain could be fully offset by these losses, as they both arise from publicly traded stock. I have loans outstanding after the underlying asset has gone — sold at a loss. I sympathize with you! The only thing I can offer is that you can at least deduct the interest on your loan. If a corporation was created 17 years ago and some employees worked there for 15 years, can founder shares still be created and assigned to these employees? Is there a tax benefit of getting these shares assigned to a corporation the employee owns? Instead of big corporation providing shares to directly to the employee they first go to another corporation that the employee owns? Assuming no change in valuation eventually taxed at normal employment income like figure of gifted shares in the event of a sale. Seems too good to be true! Can you recommend further reading materials? I am especially interested in private established corporations gifting shares to their employees. I suggest that you check with your own accountant about your particular situation — just to be safe. If the employee never sells the shares because the later share value is lower than the previous FMV when shares granted, will deferred tax be erased? Oh, yes, the shares could be sold passively. Hi Mike, Thanks for the very informative article. I believe what you are looking at covers Options and not shares. Follow up the questions above from Ken and Levi, has this been resolved re whether these rules only apply to options and not shares? Thanks for any comments on this. The rules relate to shares. Options are just a right to buy shares. This benefit is taxable stock it can be deferred for a private company until you sell the shares. There is no tax due when you receive stock options — regardless of the terms of the option grant. Hi, Mike, canada article. Have any of these provisions been updated in the 6 years since the article was originally published? But for founders and key employees it seems that both options and founders shares could be problematic? Is this still the case? If we issue shares founder shares? Yes, the rules are different in the USA. Not as good as in Canada. Many startups I know have no trouble attracting Valley Capital because they are CCPCs. In your case, if the recipients of the options shares in the Delaware Corp are Canadian, I believe that the Canadian rules are applicable canada they have no immediate tax liability. Mail will not be published required. You can use these tags: Shares vs Stock Options May 30th, Mike. For CCPCs — Canadian Controlled Private Corporations This discussion is applicable to Canadian Controlled Private Companies CCPCs. SHARES To give employees an ownership stake and incentive in the company, the best solution is to give them founders shares just like the founders took for themselves when the company was formed. Some disadvantages of issuing stock are: Deferred tax liability if shares are bought below FMV if you can figure out what FMV is — remember, these shares are highly restrictive and are worth less than those purchased by angels and other investors. A CRA assessment of the deemed benefit is a remote possibility. May need to defend the FMV. May need independent valuation. Need to make sure that shareholder agreement provisions are in place eg vesting, voting, etc. Issuance of shares at very low prices on a cap table may look bad to new investors whereas option exercises are considered normal More shareholders to manage The benefits of owning shares are: Some disadvantages with stock options are: The tax liability if options are exercised is never erased — this is exactly the same scenario as if shares were given. The lifetime capital gains exemption cannot be used unless the shares — not the options — are held for 2 years after exercising. Capital gains are calculated on the difference between the selling price and the FMV when exercised. The tax risk increases over time since it is the difference between FMV and exercise price at the time of exercise that sets up the contingent tax liability, so the longer you wait to exercise assuming steadily increasing FMVthe greater the potential tax liability. Options do not constitute ownership; optioned shares cannot be voted. Still need to have a defensible FMV; may need independent valuation. It may become a real headache if CRA requires that this be done retroactively when an exit is achieved. They could expire too soon. May need to have a very long term, say 10 years or more. Some benefits with stock options are: No tax liability when options are received, only when they are exercised. No cash outlay required until exercised and even then, it may be minimal. Can exercise options to buy shares immediately at discounted prices without having to pay any tax until shares are sold. An early exercise avoids a higher FMV, and hence avoids a greater taxable benefit, later. Grant stock options, exercisable at a nominal cost, say 1 cent — good for at least 10 years or more. Suggest that option holders exercise their option and buy shares immediately just skip step 1 altogether Make sure that grantees understand that if they exercise early or immediately, they start the 2-year clock on the deduction and also get the lifetime capital gains exemption. They should also understand that there may be a possible downside in so doing — i. Here are the possible outcomes and consequences: What can CRA do? For Publicly Listed Corporations and non-CCPCs In the case of public companies, stock option rules are different. Footnotes the devil is in the details: June 2, at 9: September 9, at 9: September 9, at 1: November 8, at 3: October 3, at June 12, at 5: June 13, at 7: August 1, at 1: August 1, at 5: August 16, at 7: August 16, at 4: September 10, at November 18, at April 11, at 1: March 25, at 3: April 8, at 9: April 11, at April 12, at 8: April 12, at May 1, at 9: May 2, at May 8, at 8: May 9, at November 17, at 8: November 18, at 8: November 19, at 8: December 9, at 9: August 22, at 7: August 24, at 8: April 27, at 7: April 27, at August 17, at 6: August 18, at 8: August 18, at 2: Leave a Reply Click here to cancel reply. Follow me on Twitter! Powered by WordPress Cell Phones for Sale at Bestincellphones. Thanks to Cheap Palm PixiiCellPhonePlans. canada taxation of employee stock options

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