I've been a Tax Pro for a couple years now, and I always rue how ignorant people are about basic tax principles.
((Not really a direct reply to this, but as context for the general vein of what prompted the following... Maybe I could have done with someone 'on my side', not just brokerage-firm contacts, although whether a US-based Tax Pro would have been au fait enough with oversees disbursments of small-change, I don't know.))
A long time ago, I got some token shares in my company[1]. The fuss I had trying to convert them back to to cash (once I was allowed to, and then
a bit more time after that[2]) with... Was it the W2
S form, from memory? Well, whatever it was, amongst the blitz of other paperwork and documentation that entirely put me off the idea of Employee Share Schemes for life.
(It's even possible that I still 'have' some later-granted shares outstanding, or would have if the company still existed. This either makes them
extremely valuable (in whatever further context they were then to be converted) or significantly less valuable than the paper some long-lost last statement from the holding firm will have cost to send to me and I'm technically still owing somebody a net handling fee. But I've long since decided I'm not going through all that again, anyway.)
The stuff I had to tell the Inland Revenue/etc about, locally, was much, much simpler than what (I presume) was destined to the IRS, and seemed not to make any significant impact to my PAYE-mediated personal taxation for that or any other year. I know it's at least part because it is a completely different system that I suddenly needed a tax-presence in, that I hadn't grown up in to know and use, but it was
goddawfully complicated to even establish my initial
bona fides, never mind to get the actual paltry (and definitely shaved) cheque(/check) in the post...
[1] Multinational, but technically a US company, who had taken over my UK company as a division, all this now in leiu of some UK pay that I
would have reveived from my UK work, but... <mumble mumble, something business-related that was well above my pay-grade>. Company listed on NY stock-exchange, but (at least at one point) my fiddly insignificant holdings/voting rights administered by a Germany-based brokerage firm... Or
something like that. (At one point I
was temporarily working in Germany itself, but I'm not sure that had any bearing on anything, and might not even have overlapped.)
[2] As I was fooling myself I was 'playing' the market, rather than doing the smart thing that the whole tax system was anticipating that the
company was probably trying to game, by dispersing value in-leiu, in a manner which us at the other end were
expected to "get a little more, pay a little more,
probably withold a little
tiny bit more from the US Treasury in the long-run, whilst the interest on fees go entirely elsewhere". As far as I ever managed to understand the deliberately obfuscating process.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 15454963 times)