In 2015 new tax concessions for employee share schemes were established.  In particular, tax concessions were created to facilitate the creation of employee option schemes for startups. In addition, to reduce the legal costs for startups in putting an employee option plan in place, the ATO released a number of standard documents.  We like the ATO’s thinking and initiative!  You can obtain them from the relevant part of the ATO website (here) or download them directly using the links below.  They are high quality documents that are worth using.

• Standard Employee Option Plan for Startups – terms of the option plan
• Standard Offer Letter – for use with the above plan
• Guide to using Standard Documents – a useful general guide to the above documents, including some information about eligibility for the startup concession and separate Corporations Law requirements

You will inevitably want to customise these documents to suit your startup, and may require related advice.  We would be happy to assist you with that.

Note that we do not own the copyright in these documents (so that the relevant restrictions in our Terms of Use do not apply to them).

If you need some other kind of legal document for your startup, then please check our other FREE documents here.