Sponsors (14)
The bill encourages broader employee ownership by offering corporations tax reductions, deductions, and streamlined treatment for stock grants — potentially creating wealth-building opportunities for workers — but does so at the cost of reduced federal revenue, risks of concentration or gaming of benefits, added administrative burdens, and diminished state/local regulatory control.
Employees at participating firms — primarily the lowest-paid 80% of eligible workers — will receive periodic company stock that vests within five years, increasing direct employee ownership and potential long-term wealth building.
Corporations that adopt qualifying SHARE plans will pay a lower federal corporate tax rate (3 percentage points reduction per qualifying year), creating a clear financial incentive for firms to implement broad employee‑ownership programs.
SHARE plan stock distributions can be deducted by firms and excluded from employees' taxable gross income at receipt, reducing tax burdens for both employers and participating employees and simplifying tax/withholding treatment at grant time.
All taxpayers may face reduced federal revenue — from repeated corporate rate cuts, deductions for distributed stock, and exclusion of received stock from employee income — increasing deficit pressure or requiring offsets/cuts elsewhere.
Benefits could be concentrated or gamed by large firms (for example by excluding high earners or manipulating stock issuance/valuation), enabling tax avoidance while delivering limited real gains to many employees.
Preempting state and local law reduces local regulatory control and could conflict with state-level corporate governance or securities goals.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Creates a tax-preferred "SHARE" employee equity program: corporations get reduced corporate tax rates while employees can exclude SHARE stock from gross income, subject to rules and caps.
Official title: To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide a reduced rate of tax for corporations that maintain a plan for distributing equity to employees, and for other purposes.
Introduced July 23, 2025 by Thomas Suozzi · Last progress July 23, 2025
Creates a new, voluntary corporate tax incentive for companies that adopt a qualified employee equity program called a SHARE plan: qualifying corporations get a reduced corporate income tax rate tied to how long they qualify, and employees exclude received SHARE stock from taxable income. The bill sets minimum employee ownership thresholds, eligibility and vesting rules, valuation rules for nonpublic firms, deduction rules for distributing stock, and authorization for Treasury to issue regulations and publish an annual list of qualifying SHARE corporations. The corporate tax reduction phases in as long as a firm meets plan rules, but the total tax benefit a corporation can receive is capped by the market value of stock issued under the SHARE plan; high-paid employees are excluded from participation, and the measure includes anti‑avoidance and controlled-group rules. The corporate rate reduction becomes effective for taxable years beginning more than one year after enactment; the employee income exclusion applies to stock received after enactment.