The Stock-Purchase Perk May Get Harder to Offer: When the FASB looked at and recommended expensing stock options, they apparently also recommended the expensing of the discount on employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs): Under old accounting rules, the shares were not reported as an "expense," and didn't hurt profit. Now, companies will have to expense the cost of the stock they set aside for ESPPs (the full market value, minus what the employees paid), and those expenses will reduce earnings. [...] Aside from reducing the discount, the most likely change that companies will make to their ESPPs will be to shorten the investment cycle in the lookback, say, to three months from six months, or to get rid of it, so that the discount applies only to the stock price on the day of purchase or at the end of the investment cycle,