Mark McLaughlin highlights a useful tax relief for companies that is perhaps less well-known than it should be.
Company shares are often issued to employees for less than market value as a reward or incentive (for simplicity, it is assumed here that the company is a ‘singleton’ company (i.e., no holding company or subsidiaries) with ‘plain vanilla’ (e.g. unrestricted and non-convertible) shares, and the employee is UK resident.
For tax purposes, the focus often tends to be on how much income tax (and possibly National Insurance contributions) the employee may have to pay, broadly on the difference between the market value of the shares and the
