Well, unfortunately, and not surprisingly, the answer to this question is "yes". I've taken this headline almost verbatim from Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) which has been trying to stop this scam for a long time--and is getting no help, and, in fact, the opposite from the president.
So, quick background. There are two keys ways big corporations use a legal scam--legislated by their bought-and-paid for politicians in both parties--to hide their profits overseas and avoid paying a fair share in taxes.
One is called "deferral", which basically means assigning profits (often through patents) to a subsidiary offshore and pretending as if the subsidiary operates independently from the home base in say New York City. It's a bullshit legal and financial maneuver (if you want a more detailed explanation, see this explanation from CTJ) but, yes, totally legal.
Second, the corporate tax attorney's wet dream is to have a "territorial" tax system, not a worldwide tax system. To strip it down to its basics, the territorial system is the bedrock for off-shoring because, as you might guess, it encourages moving profits into a territory where taxes are low or zero. A worldwide system would essentially mean the IRS could tax a U.S.-based corporation no matter where its profits were sheltered.
CTJ:
Currently, American corporations have an incentive to move jobs offshore or shift profits offshore because they are not taxed on offshore profits unless those profits are repatriated. Under a territorial system, American corporations would not be taxed on their offshore profits ever, regardless of whether or not they are repatriated.[emphasis added]
As CTJ
explained last year:
Both of these tax systems require tax enforcement authorities to accept the pretense that a web of “subsidiary corporations” in different countries are truly different companies, even when they are all completely controlled by a CEO in, say New York or Connecticut or London. This leaves tax enforcement authorities with the impossible task of divining which profits are “earned” by a subsidiary company that is nothing more than a post office box in Bermuda, and which profits are earned by the American or European corporation that controls that Bermuda subsidiary.
Yeah, this is a bit technical, and I've tried to simplify it. But, along with the robbery of peoples' sweat-of-the-brow by hammering down wages, this is where the massive robbery of our wealth happens--in the dark corners of tax policy.
So, now, back to the president. CTJ is making it absolutely clear that the president is taking the side of big corporations, to the great detriment of regular taxpayers.:
It turns out that some of the OECD governments are proposing reforms that challenge the arm’s length concept at least to some degree, but the US government is pushing a line that is more favorable to the multinational corporations.
Robert Stack, the Treasury Department deputy assistant secretary for International Affairs in the Office of Policy, is quoted by the Daily Tax Report as saying that the “main challenge for the U.S. is to get this project to work back from blunt instruments and towards policies that are understandable, fair, clear, administrable, and reach the right technical tax results."[emphasis added]
What Robert Stack is saying, in his doublespeak ("the right technical tax results"), is essentially an argument for keeping deferral and supporting a territorial system--both of which are legal scams for U.S.-based corporations to keep billions of dollars of profits from being legitimately taxed here...which means less money for basic services for people here.
All of which will make the party's "superpac" donors very, very happy--but will end up simply increasing the burden on the rest of us and make the tepid $10.10-an-hour minimum wage increase, over time, even more tepid and meaningless.