Now, the corporations that gave those generous awards are beginning to benefit, too, in the form of tax savings. Thanks to a quirk in tax law, companies can claim a tax deduction in future years that is much bigger than the value of the stock options when they were granted to executives. This tax break will deprive the federal government of tens of billions of dollars in revenue over the next decade.

And it is one of the many obscure provisions buried in the tax code that together enable most American companies to pay far less than the top corporate tax rate of 35 percent — in some cases, virtually nothing even in very profitable years.

In Washington, where executive pay and taxes are highly charged issues, some critics in Congress have long sought to eliminate this tax benefit, saying it is bad policy to let companies claim such large deductions for stock options without having to make any cash outlay.

Moreover, they say, the policy essentially forces taxpayers to subsidize executive pay, which has soared in recent decades. Those drawbacks have been magnified, they say, now that executives — and companies — are reaping inordinate benefits by taking advantage of once depressed stock prices. A stock option entitles its owner to buy a share of company stock at a set price over a specified period.

The corporate tax savings stem from the fact that executives typically cash in stock options at a much higher price than the initial value that companies report to shareholders when they are granted. But companies are then allowed a tax deduction for that higher price. For example, in the dark days of JuneMel Karmazin, chief executive of Sirius XM Radio, was granted options to buy the company stock at 43 cents a share.

If he exercises and sells at that price, Mr. SiriusXM did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Dozens of other major corporations doled out unusually large grants of stock options in late and — including Ford, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Google and Starbucks — and soon may be eligible for corresponding tax breaks. Executive compensation experts say that barring another market collapse, the payouts to executives — and tax benefits for the companies — will run well into the billions of dollars in the coming years.

Indeed, of the billions of shares worth of options issued after the crisis, only about 11 million have thus far been exercised, according to data compiled by InsiderScore, a consulting firm that compiles regulatory filings on insider stock sales.

For some companies, awarding stock options can seem like a tempting bargain, since there is no cash outlay and the tax benefits can exceed the original cost. Under standard accounting rules, companies calculate the fair market value of the options on the date they are granted and report that value as an expense, disclosed in regulatory filings. But the Internal Revenue Service allows companies to claim a tax deduction for any increase in value when those options are exercised, usually years later trend indicators for day trading a much higher price.

For most companies, the primary advantage of using options definition nifty stock market that options allow them to award large bonuses without actually depleting their cash, said Alan J.

Straus, a New York tax lawyer and accountant.

Some corporate watchdog groups, and a few members of Congress, call the corporate tax deduction an expensive loophole. Many tax lawyers and accountants counter that the tax deduction is justifiable because the options represent a real cost to the company.

And because the executives who exercise their options are taxed at high individual rates, the companies say that a change would executive stock options taxation in an unfair form of double taxation. The increases in the value of options granted during the financial crisis would not just cost the Treasury.

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Shareholder advocates and corporate governance experts say they come at the expense of other investors, too, whose stake in the company is diluted.

Well before the market downturn, hundreds of American corporations reduced their tax bills by billions of dollars a year through their shrewd use of stock options. A decade ago, companies like Cisco and Microsoft were widely criticized because their stock options created such big deductions that, in some years, they paid no federal taxes at all. When shareholders and regulators complained about the excessive use of stock options, Microsoft temporarily stopped issuing them in View all New York Times newsletters.

Companies say the tax treatment is justified because they are deducting the cost of paying an employee, just as they would if they how much money can earn from google adsense a salary in cash. Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, has tried for nearly a decade to eliminate the tax break, which affects the most commonly granted stock options.

They lost a little of their appeal after accounting changes in forced companies to start counting the value of the options as an expense. Scandals over the backdating of options also made some companies wary. Restricted stock and other forms of equity sometimes replaced options. Once the stock market dropped in the fall ofhowever, there was a spike in the number of options granted by companies.

Goldman Sachs granted 36 million stock options in December10 times more than the previous year. General Electric, which granted 18 million options in and 25 million options ingranted million in and million in Some companies say that their options awards in and were decided before it was clear the stock market would recover. Others say that because share prices had plunged, they had to issue more options to reach the target compensation for their top executives.

General Electric acknowledged that it issued far more options after the market collapse because they offered a cheaper way to pay executives than restricted stock and other forms of compensation. To be sure, some executives whose option values have skyrocketed can point to notable accomplishments. In the years since, Starbucks has laid off thousands of employees, closed hundreds of stores and retooled its business plan.

But other companies whose executives have already cashed in some options issued during the crisis have not performed particularly well compared with their peers. The oil drilling company Halliburton is one. And some financial services companies that have seen the value of the options they issued after the market collapse rise significantly — including Goldman Sachs and Capital One Financial — were able to weather the crisis, in some part, because of the billions in federal bailout money they received.

A version of this article appears in print on December 30,on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Tax Benefits From Options As Windfall for Businesses. Order Reprints Today's Paper Subscribe. Tell us what you think. Please upgrade your browser.

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