Not paying taxes “makes me smart,” Donald J. Trump said last week. His surrogates called him “a genius” for his recently revealed tax avoidance strategies.

Well, if they are right, the executives running corporate America are absolute virtuosos.

An exhaustive study being released on Tuesday by a group of researchers shows in detail how Fortune 500 companies have managed to shelter trillions of dollars in profits offshore from being taxed. Mr. Trump’s efforts pale by comparison. Worse, the companies have managed to hide many of their tax havens completely, in many cases reporting different numbers to different government agencies to obfuscate exactly how they’ve avoided Uncle Sam.

And, yes, it is all legal.

The immediate response from many readers may be ire for the companies avoiding taxes — or for Mr. Trump. But that’s not the goal of this particular column. In this case, that kind of thinking may even be counterproductive.

Instead, the study — which notes that 58 Fortune 500 companies would owe $212 billion in additional federal taxes, “equal to the entire state budgets of California, Virginia and Indiana combined,” if they were taxed properly — should be a five-alarm call to voters and lawmakers to finally fix the tax system. If all the attention on Mr. Trump’s tax bill (or lack of one) isn’t enough to inspire a complete rewrite of the tax code, this study may be.