Equity turns your compensation into a series of tax decisions, most of them made before you realize they’re decisions.
A senior role rarely arrives as just a larger paycheck. It arrives as restricted stock, options, a deferred-compensation election, a bonus that lands in the wrong year. Each carries a tax consequence, and most of them are settled quietly, by default, long before a return is ever prepared. The difficult part isn’t answering the tax questions. It’s knowing which ones to ask and when. For most of them, the moment to act has already passed by the time you’re filing. William D. Briggs prepares those returns, and does the planning before them.
The questions most executives never get around to asking.
Equity compensation
RSUs, restricted stock and options are each taxed differently, and at different moments. Treated as one lump of “stock,” they quietly create income and tax you never planned for.
Stock options
Whether you exercise, hold or sell, and when you do, changes what you owe, sometimes dramatically. It can even trigger alternative minimum tax well before a single share is sold.
Vesting & liquidity events
A large vesting, exercise or sale is a tax event you can plan around, but only if it’s seen coming. Discovered at filing, the good options are already gone.
Concentrated company stock
When much of your wealth rides on one employer’s stock, the tax questions get serious. Bill handles those and coordinates with your investment advisor. He plans the tax; he doesn’t manage the money.
Deferred compensation
When you elect, when it pays out and which state you live in when it does. The timing decisions around deferred compensation are easy to get wrong simply by not making them.
Multi-state taxation
Work, move, retire or travel across state lines and more than one state may claim part of your compensation. Which, and how much, is more often a matter of planning than of fate.
A new senior role
A promotion seldom comes as just salary. Bonuses, equity and deferred compensation tend to arrive together, and the best moment to get ahead of the taxes is the day the offer lands, not the following spring.
If any of that gave you pause, the pause is worth a phone call.
None of this ever shows up on a return as a line called “the decision you should have made.” It shows up as tax you didn’t need to pay. Bill’s work is the thinking that happens before the forms, while there’s still a choice on the table.
(847) 615‑1520