409A Valuation Document Checklist

A 409A report carries two dates and they are weeks apart. Every checklist ranking for this query lists what the appraiser wants. None of them mentions that the twelve-month safe harbour runs from the valuation date printed inside the report, not from the day the report arrived. The regulation presumes an appraisal reasonable when it was made as of a date no more than 12 months before the relevant transaction, and it names the date of grant as that transaction. So delivery lag is spent window.

Brightwater Systems is an invented Delaware company whose Series A closed in July 2025 at three dollars per preferred share. Its prior report had a valuation date of 30 September 2024, so the window closed exactly a year later. A 65,000 share grant was approved on 6 October, 371 days after that valuation date, still priced at the old 44 cent strike. The new fair market value came back at $1.15, which puts the spread on that single grant at $46,150.

Elapsed time is the other half. An appraiser sends one request list and then waits, so the whole delay collapses onto whichever item is slowest. Seventeen requests went out here. Thirteen closed inside two days from records already assembled for the startup data room checklist, and one held the report for nineteen days: monthly financials, because the books were two months behind. A register reading thirteen of seventeen complete hides which four are left, and only one of them mattered.