Can Obama curb offshoring with tax code?

President Obama unveiled tax code changes Monday he said could curb offshoring, but analysts and tax experts believe the plan will have little to no impact on the megatrend that threatens as many as one-in-four IT jobs at large companies.

The criticism boils down to this: It isn't the tax code that created the offshore outsourcing industry over the last decade; it's the low cost of highly skilled labor.

President Obama didn't address the wage gap today, but he is arguing that the tax code has played a contributing role in the growth of offshoring, and that includes high-skilled outsourcing.

In his remarks, he cited a major Indian IT outsourcing center, Bangalore, as one of the places that has benefited from tax loopholes. The U.S. has developed "a tax code that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York," Obama said.

These tax loopholes give companies that create jobs overseas the ability to take deductions on expenses "when they do not pay any American taxes on their profits," he said.

The proposed tax changes, which must be approved by Congress, may affect IT vendors that run subsidiaries overseas by denying deductions for offshore payments on things like payroll expenses, said Alan Appel, a tax attorney at Bryan Cave LLP in New York.

"By denying the deduction, the hope is that it will be more expensive to operate offshore and it will give incentives to create jobs in the U.S," Cave said.

The proposed tax code changes is about as close as the White House has come to addressing the issue of IT offshoring. Whether the administration ties the use of the H-1B visa, which is heavily used by Indian offshore firms, is still a question mark.

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said last week that the U.S. should increase the supply of foreign workers and said the H-1B cap is keeping wages high, protecting workers from global competition and creating a "privileged elite" in the U.S.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine