Old company gave me stock and won't buy it back at inflated share price!?!?!

One of the perks I received when going to work for my old company was 500 shares of non-voting stock (not options, outright stock given to me). They valued the private stock at $20/share and are now going to give me a 1099 showing a $10,000 tax burden for this year. I have asked them to buy it back but they say they cannot at this point...what can I do? They said I could give it back, but I consider the stock a perk that I should get. Can I claim a loss of $10,000 to offset the burden since the stock is essentially worthless now(the only market is the company themselves and they will not buy their own stock back!)?. I think the company valued it so high so they could get the tax credit for "compensation" but since they cannot buy it back it seems to me that they are "cheating" a little bit.

Please Help!

That sounds like a great perk. I wish my company would give me some useless paper. I could use it to start my fireplace with or to wipe up doggy pee or to clean my windows. I could doodle on it or I could make paper airplanes out of it or paper hats. I could roll it up tight and use it as a spitball shooter. The possibilities are endless.

My stupid company has only given a whole bunch of stock options that will be worth thousand of dollars when they vest. I'll probably leave the stock there and save it for retirement, how boring. Man, your company sounds like a lot more fun.

It is almost comical...

It is pretty humorous...I wish I could print up 50,000 stock certificates, give them out to my friends at $20/share, refuse to buy them back, make them pay taxes on them, and claim that I gave away $1,000,000 of my own money on my taxes, but apparently only Corporations can do that. There has to be a way that I can get around this because what they are doing is trying to give themselves a nice tax break at the expense of their current and former employees.

One suggestion I got was to transfer the stock to a non-profit organization and claim the loss to make up for the tax. Since the company has refused to buy them back I have satisfied the only restriction placed on me by the company (first right of refusal) so I just might do that.

Confused and Angry

Well darn, my old company did exactly the same thing! A little company with few employees....I never thought about asking if they would buy them back. And I was too dumb to even know I paid tax on them OR all those options over the years.

They DID eventually go public. Luckily, they became eBay.

So you never know!

This thread is FIVE YEARS OLD.

Uh oh, dumb newbie has a lot to learn about how these threads works. Mea Culpa!

*slinking out*