The fast pace of a publicly traded company makes administering equity compensation plans uniquely challenging. This is especially true for organizations experiencing rapid growth or those that have recently gone through an initial public offering (IPO).

Evolving IRS tax laws and regulations along with complex international tax laws can make payroll and equity transaction settlements very cumbersome. The recent SEC shift to a T+1 settlement period and the challenges related to managing multiple payroll vendors can create mounting pressure to verify company processes work efficiently to avoid penalties associated with not meeting required deadlines.

Evaluate your current equity processes and controls to determine relevancy, uncover operational enhancement opportunities, and secure resources needed to meet your equity program’s challenges, pain points, and potential growth.

Surface Process Challenges and Potential Improvement Areas

A holistic equity compensation assessment can help your organization with:

• Improved tax compliance to help eliminate penalties.
• Timely information delivery to third-party tax vendors responsible for calculating taxes for mobile work forces.
• Complete equity transaction settlement processing to ensure compliance with IRS tax remittance requirements.
• Timely transaction settlement and share distributions to comply with SEC settlement T+1 requirements.
• Increased participant engagement and satisfaction.
• Time returned to plan administrators to focus on other business and value-add areas.

Understanding how teams and systems interact gives organizations the insights needed to address issues and inefficiencies and prioritize solutions. From there, several solutions can be proposed, ranging from manual solutions to purpose-built systems.

How the Assessment Process Works

Connect all the dots in your equity compensation process with our four-phase assessment:

• Discovery. Meet with relevant teams to collect information about current processes and systems.
• Document. Use collected information to document and diagram each workflow and connection point.
• Review and Revise. Review findings with stakeholders and revise as necessary.
• Final Report. Present detailed report with problem areas and proposed solutions.

Focus Areas

Although each assessment is customized, these common areas and issues are foundational to each project.

• Operational Efficiency. Examines tax jurisdiction setup, mobility tax, over/under payments, transaction settlement process.
• Resource Utilization. Evaluates manual and automated procedures being employed.
• Data Accuracy and Completeness. Identifies areas where data inaccuracy may be causing issues and highlights areas where incomplete data can cause downstream problems.
• Compliance.Reviews ongoing challenges associated with meeting compliance deadlines and looks for flexible solutions that can help to future proof the equity process.

Extensive Equity Process Experience

Deeply immersed in more than 30 industries and closely involved in many equity processing solutions, our equity compensation professionals provide solutions specific to the nuances, challenges, and operations of the sector in which you work—while customizing plans to meet your unique needs.

We support a range of publicly traded and private companies, including those with millions of equity compensation plan participants and numerous Fortune 100 businesses.

Our one-firm approach allows your organization to tap into the full resources of our firm, integrating guidance and solutions related to other integral support areas including finance, tax, and audit concerns, IPO solutions, transaction consulting, and more.