The Advisors' Blog

– Broc Romanek

It’s quite rare that I blog other than early in the morning. It’s too tempting to chase news across the day. But I thought I would throw up some big news regarding the earth-shattering House tax bill – even though it could be more complete if I waited til morning (including where we stand with the Senate version). Here’s the skinny about how the House made changes to its tax bill today (see this official summary):

1. The House has deleted the offending provisions about equity compensation from the bill (Section 3801 of the bill) – but it left in the provision allowing deferral of tax of stock options for private companies. And it sounds like the provision is modified that so it no longer applies to RSUs (it originally applied to both RSUs & options).

2. The changes to Section 162(m) still stand (Section 3802 of the bill). I think that’s a done deal, assuming they can get the rest of the bill passed. It’s clearly a revenue raiser and if the corporate tax rate is only 20%, companies probably don’t care about the deduction as much anyway. I’m sure it’s a trade-off many companies are willing to make.

So the upshot is that all of Section 3801 is struck – so no changes to the taxation of NQDC – and 409A still stands, so no big changes to the taxation of options & RSUs. And this is a week of my life I can never get back. We’ll be posting the new horde of memos that are sure to come in our “Regulatory Reform” Practice Area…