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When my former employer tanked, it was estimated by the court trustee that we had about 25 mil in assets and 100 mil in debt (including the two paychecks that every American employee didn't get and the pension fund money that they literally stole out of the accounts of the UK employees... grumble grumble.) The stock had been trading at around 75 cents prior to the bankruptcy announcement. Afterwards, it was delisted, but somehow still managed to continue trading at a half-cent to 1-cent. This caused a lot of problems for employees who had been part of the Employee Stock Purchase Plan, because they couldn't write it off as "worthless" for tax purposes because it clearly still had a miniscule worth, yet they couldn't get any of their brokers to bother with the transaction of actually selling those shares.
I think in the end most of them just pretended that it WAS worth zero and wrote it off as such. Could that be counted against those employees in an IRS audit? And how is it that a bankrupt company, now essentially "owned" by the court as they will be determining to whom all the existing assets will be given, can still have "shares" at all??
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