Instead, Donaldson said Tuesday that the SEC would probably move slowly to implement the controversial rule under consideration by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB).

In an interview with USA TODAY reporters and editors, Donaldson said that the FASB, not Congress, should have the final say. ''The present way of valuing options is wrong,'' Donaldson said. ''They may be worth one or two or one hundred (dollars). But the one thing we do know is that options are not worth zero.''

Following accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia and other companies, many experts claimed that the practice of awarding stock options to executives motivated those executives to manipulate their company's financial statements to hit earnings targets.

Stock options are rights to buy shares for a preset price at a future date. If a stock's price is far above the options' exercise price, option holders can realize large gains.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary John Snow and renowned investor Warren Buffet have suggested that companies are deceiving investors by paying large amounts of compensation in the form of stock options, which don't get recorded as expenses on earnings statements. Companies currently disclose the cost of options in footnotes in their financial reports.

In the past two years, Coca-Cola, Gillette and other companies have voluntarily assigned a value to the options they give out.

But in Silicon Valley, where high-tech start-ups rely on stock options to pay employees without hurting their financial statements, the FASB's proposal to force companies to assign a value to those options and record them as expenses has received stiff opposition.

Donaldson said that Silicon Valley's claims that the new FASB proposal would ruin their businesses were overblown. ''What I've been saying to the high-tech industry (is that) you have lost the battle of whether options should be expensed,'' Donaldson said. ''You may have won that battle five or six years ago, but you've lost that battle (now).''

Instead, Donaldson suggested that high-tech firms try to figure out a way to assign a reasonable value to stock options, even those which don't vest for many years. The FASB is working on such a formula. But in July, by a lopsided margin, the House of Representatives passed a measure that would strip the FASB of its power to set standards. Instead, the House measure would only require companies to assign a value to the options awarded to their top five executives.

Saying that it was an ''amazing vote by the House, to take standard-setting back into the political arena,'' Donaldson said: ''It just doesn't make any sense at all for Congress to mess around with this.''

More recently, 52 senators sent Donaldson a letter asking him to proceed slowly with the rule on stock options that the FASB is expected to complete this year.