Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Updating Option Backdating

It was inevitable that the option backdating scandal would breed a number of cottage industries, so we have a new backdating blog niche as highlighted in a San Jose Mercury News article. I won’t point out that I was blogging on this topic for the past few months including the well-known If You Give a Moose a Stock Option, but I guess to be included as a backdating blog one is only allowed to discuss backdating. Maybe I’ll limit this posting to that topic and see what happens. Or maybe the Mercury News writer doesn't have children and couldn't understand why anyone would give a moose a stock option.

Now that we’ve begun exploring what the backdating scandals mean for Boards of Directors, executives, employees, lawyers, and accountants, HR might be the next target, as discussed in Stock Option Backdating: Another Crossroads for HR? This is one of a three-part article being distributed in the daily conference newsletter (hard copy only, it doesn’t seem to be online) at the Annual Conference of the Society for Human Resource Management.

If you are interested in exploring the global ramifications of improper option granting practices, attend Global Equity Organization’s webcast International Implications of Grant Backdating on 6 July at 16:30 GMT (that’s 8:30am PDT for those of us on the west coast). I’ll be co-presenting with Bill Dunn of PriceWaterhouseCoopers and covering the variety of activities that have been lumped under the “backdating” label – spring-loading, smoothing, early granting, late granting, and opportunism – as well introducing the widespread financial, regulatory, and other implications of each.

This seminar is complimentary and has limited registration space. For more information, visit Web Seminar Registration or to register, visit http://www.regonline.com/100508

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