August 12th, 2016

There is much irony in the US Chamber of Commerce’s desire to prevent the Treasury and the current Administration from stopping inversions, at least unilaterally, by asking a Federal District Court to hold a part of the temporary regulations on inversions invalid. Viewed from a narrow lens of legality (and not legality and tax policy) the recently issued temporary (anti-inversion) regulations stray beyond permitted boundaries of proper rule-making. But looking through a wider lens into tax policy issues, what is the US Chamber of Commerce doing to help with the continuing exodus of US based companies MNEs relocate overseas? Don’t inversions (really limited to U.S. parent corporations based on our worldwide corporate income tax and at the highest corporate income tax rate) result in the loss of tax revenues and the movement of capital and labor outside of the United States? Is that good? If not, then shouldn’t the U.S. Chamber of Commerce simply pound the table to get Congress in a moment of bipartisan “weakness” to lower the corporate income tax rate?