Company: ACHV
Filing Date: 2025-04-28
Form Type: DEF 14A
Source: 0000950170-25-059297
Chunk: 29

Company: ACHIEVE LIFE SCIENCES, INC.
Filing Date: 2025-04-28
Form: DEF 14A
Chunk 29
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 services. The Audit Committee will be informed routinely as to the non-audit services actually provided by our independent registered public accounting firm pursuant to this pre-approval process.

21

For the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years, the Audit Committee approved all of the services provided by PwC described above.

22

We are asking our stockholders to approve an amendment to our 2023 Non-Employee Director Equity Incentive Plan, or the Plan, to increase the authorized number of shares of our common stock reserved for issuance under the Plan by 650,000 shares for a total of 950,000 shares, or the Plan Amendment which we expect to be sufficient for two years. If the stockholders approve the Plan Amendment, we will grant the customary annual equity compensation paid to our non-employee directors on the date of each annual meeting of stockholders and any future one-time initial grants of equity awards.

We believe the proposed Plan Amendment would enable us to continue to attract and retain qualified directors and to respond to relevant market changes in equity compensation practices. The Plan has a remaining pool of 9,750 shares and if our stockholders do not approve the Plan Amendment, we will not be able to issue new awards to our non-employee directors under the Plan and our ability to issue awards to directors will be severely restricted as there are insufficient shares available under our 2018 Equity Incentive Plan.

Approval of the Plan Amendment is intended to enable us to continue granting equity awards to non-employee directors, which is a critical element of our non-employee director compensation program. Offering a equity compensation program is vital to attracting and retaining highly skilled board members in our highly competitive industry. We use equity awards to provide incentives to our eligible non-employee directors who provide significant services to the company. Accordingly, approving the Plan Amendment is in the best interest of our stockholders because equity awards help us to:

attract, motivate and retain experienced non-employee directors to our board; and

align director interests with those of our stockholders.

We strongly believe that the approval of the Plan Amendment will enable us to achieve our goals in attracting and retaining qualified and experienced non-employee directors which we believe is critical to the execution of our strategy and continued success.

Without equity incentives, we would be forced to consider cash replacement alternatives to provide a market-competitive total compensation package necessary to attract and retain key non-employee director talent who bring knowledge, experience and perspectives which are critical to our future successes. These cash replacement alternatives would, among other