Republicans and Democrats have railed against the accounting acrobatics that American multinationals exploit to avoid paying taxes on foreign earnings. They buy or merge with foreign companies to establish headquarters outside the United States — a practice known as inversion — or relocate their patents and copyrights to places with low tax rates, like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. The arrangement not only deprives the United States of revenue but also increases the tax burden on American businesses that cannot or will not move their profits overseas.

The current system has perpetuated a lot of waste and nonsense, said Alan D. Viard, a tax expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The nominal corporate rate is 35 percent, roughly 10 points above the average rate in most developed European nations. That differential encourages tax avoidance, Mr. Viard said.

Apple, for example, has kept earnings abroad and borrowed money from its own foreign subsidiaries to pay dividends and make new investments. Because the interest paid on loans is also deductible, Apple ends up reaping a second tax benefit.

“These bizarre short-term loans are just silliness,” Mr. Viard said.

“Whatever the rate is, it should be collected when the money is earned,” regardless of whether it is repatriated, he said, adding, “Companies should be free to keep the money where they want and use it however they want.”

In the past, policy makers tried to persuade companies to bring home profits by dangling a carrot: a voluntary, one-time tax holiday for companies that brought overseas profits back to invest in the United States. Yet the promised investment boom from a 2005 initiative never materialized, and the tax holiday turned into more of a permanent vacation. Companies did ship some money home — about $299 billion — but nearly all of it was used to increase shareholder dividends or buy back stock.