I’m burning the midnight oil tonight pulling together a story for Business Spectator on reforming Australia’s tax treatment of employee option schemes.
This is a fraught subject as Australia bucked the global trend in 2009 after it became obvious the corporate sector was abusing the existing tax rules that were largely in line with most OECD nations.
In a clumsy, poorly thought out reaction – which is sadly the mark of modern Australian governments of all shades – the then Rudd Labor government radically changed the rules governing employee schemes that made it difficult for any business to offer stock to their staff.
Last week I spoke to Sydney business intelligence company Encompass and after the video the founders told me about the importance of their share scheme, it illustrated exactly the problem facing Australian startups.
Five years on and it’s apparent the strict rules are working against Australian business and various industry associations, accounting groups and startups are lobbying for reform.
One of the lobbying initiatives is Deloitte’s Retaining Talent project that has some fairly modest proposals in bringing fairer rules back for smaller and younger startups.
The story’s particularly interesting for me in that I’m bringing together a number of previous posts citing how other countries and cities like San Francisco and the United Kingdom have changed their rules on option schemes.
For Australia, the closure of the country’s car manufacturing industry and the struggles of the agricultural sector are bringing home to voters and the government just how seriously the country squandered the massive mining boom of the last decade.
While reforming startup option schemes is a useful start, it’s hard not to think it’s way too little and way too late for the country to begin planning for the post mining boom economy.