The process of granting an option that is dated prior to the date that the company granted that option.

Volatility is especially significant: 29% of companies with high volatility appear to have manipulated grant dates, compared to 13% of those with low volatility.Dozens of companies are under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for backdating stock options. Alternatively, a company could hit a low without actually backdating its options by granting awards just before a major (positive) earnings announcement, a practice known as "spring-loading." A more extreme and more clearly illegal practice was to say that an award was exercised on a date other than its actual exercise date. Attorney's Office in Northern California has launched a series of investigations and in July issued criminal and securities fraud charges against two top executives at Brocade Communications. National concern about the practice has been spurred by a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal. Companies found to have practiced this could be forced to restate their earnings.In a backdated situation, however, the options would be granted today (August 16), but their listed day of granting would be June 1 in order to give the options a lower strike price.Options backdating defeats the purpose of linking an executive's compensation to the company's performance, because the bearer of the options will already have experienced a gain.This means they must wait for the stock to appreciate before making any money.(For more insight, see ) Although it may appear shady, public companies can typically issue and price stock option grants as they see fit, but this will all depend on the terms and conditions of their stock option granting program. District Attorney's Office has also issued several subpoenas in launching a criminal probe. The typical practice was to record a felicitously timed prior date as the grant date, such as the point when the stock had been at its lowest in recent months, instead of the date when the award was actually granted. Nejat Seyhun of the University of Michigan for the newspaper showed that that options granting practices between 20 often failed to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley requirement that grants of awards to executives be reported within two days of board approval (T"he Dating Game: Do Managers Designate Option Grant Dates to Increase Their Compensation? Prior research at Erik Lie at the University of Iowa found a pattern of probable options backdating in a number of companies prior to 2002.In the past, granted options were only required to be disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) within two months of the options being granted, which gives companies a window for backdating.Options backdating is the practice of altering the date a stock option was granted, to a usually earlier (but sometimes later) date at which the underlying stock price was lower.This process makes the granted option in-the-money and of value to the holder.This process occurred when companies were only required to report the issuance of stock options to the SEC within two months of the grant date.Companies would simply wait for a period in which the company's stock price fell to a low and then moved higher within a two-month period.The company would then grant the option but date it at or near its lowest point.