> Sounds like black hat tax accounting. If it's still worth something after 3 years it would be an in-kind payment which will need to be taxed.

Not really black hat though: it's extremely common. In many countries there are specific rules as to how much you can deduce: say 33.33% yearly and after three years it's considered to have a residual value of zero or 20% yearly and after five years it's considered 0.

But then: if you play by the rule, by not deducing 100% in a year... After x years it is considered to be worth just that: zero.

So even though "it's still worth something", from an accounting point of view it can be worth zero (depending on the item).

So you can do whatever you want with it even if it's true value is not zero. You can burn it, stash it, give it away for free.

Basically: anything you do with it except specifically sell it is easier from an accounting point of view.

Things get a bit more complicated when you cannot deduce 100% over x years but only, say, 60% over x years. Then the company, logically, is supposed to sell the item (laptop, bicycle, car) for 40% of the residual value to the item.

For example a friend of mine had his company buy him a 10 K EUR bicycle (no kidding) and after x years (don't remember if it was 3 or 4), he bought the bicycle for himself for 2 K EUR.

There might be special exemptions, but in general what matters for transfer to employees is market value. Legally speaking, see e.g. this Irish documentation (first to show up in my Google search): "You might choose to give your employee an asset which has depreciated in value. Where this occurs the value of the benefit is the market value of the asset on the date of the gift." https://www.revenue.ie/en/employing-people/benefit-in-kind-f... Same thing in Canada and UK, 3 out of 3 countries all do it that way (in general, Canada has up to 500$ exemption): "When gifting capital property to an employee (or anyone else for that matter), the proceeds of disposition for bookkeeping purposes is recorded as zero dollars. This, however, is not how the transaction is treated for tax purposes by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). This is because, the CRA sees the gifting of assets as have being sold for fair market value." https://www.koroll.ca/koroll-and-company-blog/the-tax-implic...

Same in Czechia. The accounting value is 0 but you can't just sell it for free. You have to sell it for the current market value and pay taxes from this income.