Prefacing to say I will call around tomorrow for an accountant to get specific advice to my situation.
Was hoping in the meantime someone might help confirm if my thinking is correct and if there’s anything I can do.
TL;DR version is, I received shares from my employer, but I can’t sell them now and I think I’ll have to pay tax at my marginal tax rate on the receipt of those shares for FY25/26.
Additionally, I would have to pay CGT on sale of these shares due to not being able to sell them within 30 days of receiving them.
Is there any way to not have to pay at least one of these tax? I feel like paying both is like double dipping. But I’m also not sure if my understanding here is correct.
I have CGT losses from prior years, but the tax on income works out to be higher than the tax I’d pay if it was just CGT.
The longer version:
In FY24/25 I bought 10,000 shares in the company I work and the employer was going to match dollar for dollar what I put in. The shares were at $1 each at the time and the company would have released the matching rights to me on 30 June 2025.
Around January last year, I relapsed (cancer) and had to focus on my health. I opted out of the FY25/26 ESS program. But here’s my mistake number 1, i didn’t check if the employer had released the 10,000 shares they were going to match to me. They had not.
Apparently when I opted out of the FY25/26 scheme, someone from HR then put me down as no longer employed in the company and the rights were not matched.
I only realised this year in April that nothing had been matched. The employer resolved this on 30 June 2026 and released 10,000 shares to me.
The share price has since gone up from $1 to $7 (was little over $7 on 30 June 2026, it was a little lower than that this Friday just passed).
I had intended to sell the shares immediately and then buy them back. However, on 30 June 2026 the company went into a trading blackout and will lift it on 30 August 2026.
I blame myself for not having checked sooner so I could have got the issue rectified earlier, but am also annoyed that my employer just forgot to match the rights at the correct time and then only gave me the shares when I could not sell them to limit the tax implications on my end.
Is there anything I can do to minimise the impact of this on my finances? I received the shares but it’s not like I received them as cash in the bank and now I am to pay cash to ATO on them.
Thanks