Administration January 10, 2005

Pressure on FASB Produces Options Expensing Delay

October 13, 2004 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - Under intense pressure from both lawmakers and the corporate world, US accounting lawmakers have retreated a step from their intention to impose employee stock-option accounting rules by postponing things for six months.

Reported by

Fred Schneyer

The vote to put off implementation of mandatory options expensing was unanimous, a spokesman for the Financial Accounting Standards Board told Reuters. Five board members backed the plan to delay for a half year until June 15, 2005.

The delay is in response to several complaints FASB received from public companies that said the original deadline of January 1, 2005 (See FASB Hands Down Option Expensing Proposal ) was too early because they are also trying to meet a separate November deadline set by the US Securities and Exchange Commission to clean up their internal controls to prevent accounting fraud. FASB has been working for over a year on revising stock options expensing rules (See The Bottom Line: Expensing Proposition ).

More information about the option expensing issue is at http://www.fasb.org/project/equity-based_comp.shtml .