4 ms·

My CPA said the maximum I can do is $3,000/year, I'm also in CA :)

deanmoriarty 8y ago
mmm, as far as I know $3,000/year is the maximum capital loss (from schedule D) that you can claim against your income. But that has nothing to do with your AMT tax credit, which you should have generated the year you exercised ISOs (form 8801). The AMT tax credit you can use every year should be limited to the difference between your regular income tax and AMT income tax each and every year (if positive). You keep going like this until you extinguish it. For example, for tax year 2018 I had ~$10,000 of capital loss carryover (from unrelated stock sale), and ~$40,000 of AMT tax credit carryover (from previous ISOs). When I filed my taxes, I was able to claim $3,000 of those capital losses against my income (thus generating a $7,000 capital loss carryover for 2019) and $5,500 AMT tax credit to offset my final tax liability (thus generating $34,500 of AMT tax credit carryover for 2019). As you can see, I used both the capital loss carryover AND the AMT tax credit, they're two different beasts. I didn't use any CPA and did all of this by myself (+ TurboTax) since it seemed straightforward (and admittedly I might have studied a bit too much how taxation of stock options works). If you find that I'm horribly wrong, please let me know, but it's not the first time I find a CPA being not informed in this kind of stuff (not saying yours is), which can be costly since, if you don't claim the credit in a timely fashion, is just lost from an IRS point of view (the forms are pretty mechanic and always refer to "last year carryover"). In particular, I don't understand how your company going belly up can generate capital loss for you, since you said you had an exercise price of $0.01 per share, so it seemed to me the money you lost was because of the AMT, hence the $3,000/year limitation is like apple and oranges and definitely not a ceiling of how much you can claim each year on the AMT credit.
- martin_ 8y ago
  Thanks so much for this info! I'll look into it!

mmm, as far as I know $3,000/year is the maximum capital loss (from schedule D) that you can claim against your income. But that has nothing to do with your AMT tax credit, which you should have generated the year you exercised ISOs (form 8801). The AMT tax credit you can use every year should be limited to the difference between your regular income tax and AMT income tax each and every year (if positive). You keep going like this until you extinguish it. For example, for tax year 2018 I had ~$10,000 of capital loss carryover (from unrelated stock sale), and ~$40,000 of AMT tax credit carryover (from previous ISOs). When I filed my taxes, I was able to claim $3,000 of those capital losses against my income (thus generating a $7,000 capital loss carryover for 2019) and $5,500 AMT tax credit to offset my final tax liability (thus generating $34,500 of AMT tax credit carryover for 2019). As you can see, I used both the capital loss carryover AND the AMT tax credit, they're two different beasts. I didn't use any CPA and did all of this by myself (+ TurboTax) since it seemed straightforward (and admittedly I might have studied a bit too much how taxation of stock options works). If you find that I'm horribly wrong, please let me know, but it's not the first time I find a CPA being not informed in this kind of stuff (not saying yours is), which can be costly since, if you don't claim the credit in a timely fashion, is just lost from an IRS point of view (the forms are pretty mechanic and always refer to "last year carryover"). In particular, I don't understand how your company going belly up can generate capital loss for you, since you said you had an exercise price of $0.01 per share, so it seemed to me the money you lost was because of the AMT, hence the $3,000/year limitation is like apple and oranges and definitely not a ceiling of how much you can claim each year on the AMT credit.

martin_ 8y ago
Thanks so much for this info! I'll look into it!