A report by The New York Times' The DealBook pointed out that the rise of US companies merging with foreign firms abroad would not be a good thing for Washington in terms of lost tax revenues.

Villanova University School of Law professor J Richard Harvey said, "The impact in any one year may not be material, but the cumulative impact over time adds up. "Over time, more multinationals may want to expatriate or invert, and we could wake up in 10 or 20 years and it might be a meaningful number."

Although federal regulators like the Internal Revenue Service had enacted rules to reduce the flow of corporate dollars outside the US, corporate inversion by companies had not stopped since 1982.

An inversion is the process of a company adopting the address of its foreign subsidiary in order to take advantage of lower corporate taxes. Consolidations by US companies and foreign firms often led to reincoporated companies changing registration addresses. The move would allow savings of 35% of their earnings, of which the rate is the current tax rate imposed by the US government. Moreover, reincorporated companies would be able to keep cash resulting from sales abroad and not pay repatriation taxes.

However, the government under President Barack Obama showed signs of tightening rules to combat inversion by US companies.