The Advisors' Blog

– Broc Romanek

Here’s the intro from this blog by Exequity’s Ed Hauder:

As companies begin to get their equity plan proposals ready for the 2017 proxy season, it is an appropriate time to review those equity plan proposals to see if they contain or permit the transfer of equity awards to third parties for value, e.g., the ability of participants to sell stock options to an unrelated investor, such as was done at Microsoft in 2003. If companies review ISS’s Equity Plan Scorecard Policy, there is not a specific mention of any concern over transferable stock awards. Instead, companies need to review the ISS policy on Transferable Stock Option (TSO) Programs. Under that policy, ISS indicates that it will recommend against equity plan proposals if the details of an ongoing TSO program are not provided to shareholders.

This is significant because the specific criteria that ISS expects companies to detail are not those ordinarily include in a typical equity plan proposal seeking shareholder approval of a new or amended equity plan, and include, but are not limited to, the following:

– Eligibility
– Vesting
– Bid-price
– Term of options
– Cost of the program and impact of the TSOs on a company’s total option expense, and
– Option repricing policy.

If a company’s equity plan provides for the transferability of equity awards to third parties, and the above TSO disclosure are not made (which ISS will then evaluate on a case-by-case basis), then the company can expect a negative ISS vote recommendation on their equity plan proposal even if they have run the ISS Equity Plan Scorecard model and believe the plan will pass muster.

Also check out this memo from Ed about the new FAQs from ISS…