Republicans and Democrats in Washington rarely agree on anything these days. But in recent months almost everyone seems to have coalesced around the notion that the corporate tax system is broken and needs to be fixed.

President Obama is for it. So are the two leaders of the tax-writing committees in Congress: the House Ways and Means chairman, Dave Camp, a Republican, and Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who plans to retire next year and may be seeking a capstone for his career. The country’s biggest companies have declared loudly that they are in favor of revising the nation’s business tax system, too.

Despite the widespread support, the campaign for an overhaul is exposing deep fault lines within the business world that suggest it may fall apart. The problem is how to pay for everything lawmakers and businesses want without adding to the deficit.

The main goal of the advocates on both sides of the aisle is to lower the official corporate top rate from 35 percent, the highest among industrialized nations. Republican leaders and a large number of giant companies also want to end what they regard as the noxious practice of taxing the profits that multinational corporations earn abroad. The United States is one of the few countries to do so.