Share Incentives

Motivate and retain your top performers through competitive pay packages and share incentives, and keep everyone focussed on your long-term growth. Our skill is in helping you to navigate your way through the choices and decide on a plan that works best for your company.

Selecting your share plan

Key to the best and most competitive pay packages in many sectors is share incentives, whether stock options or shares. We advise on all four of HMRC’s tax-advantaged plans, also referred to as their “approved plans”. These are:

• Enterprise Management Incentives (EMI)
• Company Share Option Plans (CSOP)
• Share Incentive Plan (SIP)
• Save as You Earn Option Plans (SAYE)

As well as these HMRC tax-favoured plans, we can advise you on equity incentive plans that give tax advantages, but are not one of the four plans above – such as:

• Growth Share Plans and Target Share Plans
• Nil-Paid or Deferred Share Plans
• Joint Share Ownership Plans (JSOPs)
• And many others, including Phantom Options, Unapproved Option Plans and Flowering Share Plans

Designing your share plan 

Having helped you select the plan that’s right for you, we then work with you to design it. We help you determine the right vesting period and the right performance conditions or KPIs ,and help you to link the vesting to the performance conditions. 

Share plan implementation

Alongside specialist share scheme lawyers, we can then put the plan in place including all legal drafting, tax advice and reporting and share valuation. This includes agreeing that value with HMRC where this is possible.

Share valuation 

Key to most equity incentive plans is valuing for tax purposes the company’s involved shares. We can prepare these valuations, whether or not we are implementing your plan. We can also value options and share incentives for accounting purposes as required by UK and international accounting standards such as FRS102 in the UK.

Reporting 

An important but dull task is the annual essential online reporting to HMRC. We can do that for you, taking that headache away. 

Employee ownership 

Many studies show that companies with increasing employee ownership are more productive, profitable, competitive and sustainable. Where the situation is right for you and your company, we can help you transition to employee ownership as part of your succession plan. We can steer you through the choices, including using the government’s tax-favoured vehicle for facilitating this, the Employee Ownership Trust.   

Get in touch and let’s make your employee benefits top-shelf.