When Did That Happen? Options and Exercise Date?

Sometimes life just doesn't seem fair.  Like when you exercise stock options from your former employer, and the stock price drops 20% from the date you told your employer to exercise the options until just a few days later.  And, even worse, at the last minute you revoked instructions to your former employer to immediately sell the shares upon exercise and instead decided to hold the shares.  In this case, the taxpayer attempted to salvage something from this by arguing that the later date was the measuring date for the compensation value since that was the date that the employer actually received the funds for the shares.This is the story we look at in the case of Walter v. Commissioner, TC Memo 2007-2, a story that doesn't have a happy ending for the taxpayer.The printed materials are found at http://edzollars.com/2007-01-06_Options.pdf .The podcast is sponsored by Leimberg Information Services, on the web at http://www.leimbergservices.com .