Sort of burying the lede there, CBS. Note where they interview the expert on tax policy near the bottom of the article, explaining why this happens. For financi

Sort of burying the lede there, CBS. Note where they interview the expert on tax policy near the bottom of the article, explaining why this happens. For financial accounting, they report stock grants using the price at the time of grant. For tax liability, they expense stock grants using the price at the time of sale. This reduces tax liability from the raw accounting profit to the company but the individual who receives stock as compensation still pays tax on it. The government doesn't lose any revenue here. It just shifts who it collects from. It's unfortunate that this seems to rarely get brought up in discussions of corporate tax rates, but corporations can't directly bear a tax burden. The burden is split between consumers, suppliers, employees, and owners. Charging the corporation instead of the consumers, suppliers, employees, and owners directly may or may not ease the administrative burden of collection, but it also obscures who the burden is placed on as it becomes determined by the relative bargaining power and price elasticity of demand between those groups, whereas taxing them directly allows the relative burdens to be reflected in the actual legal rates. This is one of those weird things that is almost universally agreed upon in tax policy circles but oddly partisan anyway. Note that the Brookings Institution is hardly some bastion of conservative thought.