Good.
I have another issue. I understand this is being looked at by the committee, and I accept that, Chair, but I'm not a normal member of this committee, and I may or may not get a chance to be a part of that.
I want to have a brief discussion about this JDS stock. I don't pretend to understand all the ins and outs of it, because most of us don't deal with this. There was a stock option plan allowed to these employees, and upon accepting it they now have assumed legal ownership, and they are responsible for any tax on capital gain that might result from their owning it.
In the case of those who sold the stocks as soon as they got them, the difference was that they were worth $300 and you could buy them for $3. It looked like a pretty good deal. Those who actually completed the transaction and sold the stock had the profit from that to pay the resulting tax bill. But there were a number of employees who did not sell it but kept it. On paper they now were worth the value of all those stocks and the difference between buying them at $3 and selling them at $300. Before they did, the tech bubble blew up, and they were worth much less.
These were just ordinary working people. We were not dealing with people who were major investors and who were dealing with big money or who had accountants and all that. We're talking about ordinary working people making $35,000 to $45,000 a year. If they said yes and took ownership of the stock but didn't sell it, they then ended up with a resulting tax bill--and in the case of some of them it was over $100,000--for stock that was not worth the money on which the formula was based.
You allowed an exemption of some sort that allowed that to be reversed, and that's, on a practical level, a good thing, but it's raised a whole lot of problems about equal treatment for others.
Number one, how much of the story do I have right? If it needs to be straightened out, please do so. Secondly, was it the position of your agency that this not take place? Was that a recommendation that you would have made?