Lawmakers continue lobbying for repatriation

Reps. Jim Matheson (D-Utah), James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Todd Rokita (R-Ind.), who also joined the conference call, also said they would be on board with a territorial system.

{mosads}But the lawmakers also said they were skeptical that broader tax reform could occur in 2012, a presidential election year, and wanted to move forward quickly with a tax holiday.

“That’s a heavy lift for Congress to do major overall tax reform,” Matheson said.

Rokita, one of more than 50 House GOP freshman to sign a letter last week pressing for repatriation, also noted that Republicans were dealing more with the tactics of how to enact repatriation, given the support for the issue within the conference.

But some congressional tax-writers, as well as the administration, have also suggested that dealing with repatriation separately would hamper tax reform efforts.

Officials on both sides of the aisle are also not willing to give up hope that a tax reform package could be hashed out next year.

At a tax reform event on Wednesday, Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said a repatriation holiday would merely encourage companies to keep an increasing amount of profits offshore.

“If you do repatriation right now, you will never have tax reform,” said Neal, the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Select Revenue Measures subcommittee. “People are going to wait for the next tax holiday.”

Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio) said at that same event, hosted by the Reforming America’s Taxes Equitably coalition, that he believed progress could be made next year on tax reform.

“As Speaker Boehner has said, some of the great accomplishments in American history, including on tax reform, have been done in a bipartisan way,” said Tiberi, the chairman of the Select Revenue Measures subcommittee.

Under the repatriation bill introduced by Brady, American multinationals could find ways to reduce their tax rate on profits brought to the U.S. to 5.25 percent – 85 percent lower than the top corporate rate of 35 percent. Similar legislation has also been introduced in the Senate.

Currently, companies are taxed on profits made anywhere on the globe but can defer paying until the money is brought to the United States. Corporations also receive credits for taxes paid to foreign governments.

Supporters of a repatriation holiday have said it’s a quick way to inject needed funds into the economy.

But skeptics have lobbed a number of criticisms at the proposal, asserting that a holiday enacted in 2004 did little to spark job creation and noting that the Joint Committee on Taxation has said a holiday would add tens of billions of dollars to the deficit over a decade.

On Wednesday’s call, Brady said he had some questions about that committee’s projections, saying he was skeptical that corporations would bring money back without the holiday.