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The White House has a new election-year plan to stop companies from shopping overseas for tax havens.

While details remain sketchy, the concept outlined by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address seems crystal clear: Start taxing foreign profits.

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The administration figures that if the IRS gets to collect the money anyway, then multinationals have less of a reason to move jobs out of the country. The tax could deter companies from hopscotching around the world to whichever country cuts them the best deal.

“We are trying to discourage the race to the bottom,” explained White House economics adviser Gene Sperling. “We’re trying to discourage the notion that when somebody is thinking about where to locate production or services, that they should not believe that they can go to a tax haven as a way of having a tax advantage over a company that chose to stay in the United States.”

Still, with Congress and the White House at loggerheads at nearly every turn — and no expectation of change before the November elections — Obama’s tax call appears much more of a campaign rallying cry than a proposal on the verge of becoming law. The president clearly has positioned tax reform as a lever for lifting employment, blaming the exodus of work overseas on a misguided federal Tax Code.

“From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax,” Obama told a joint session of Congress in his State of the Union address. “And every penny should go towards lowering taxes for companies that choose to stay here and hire here in America.”

In practice, though, tweaking taxes to boost employment might be easier said than done.

Corporate tax policy has become a source of tension for the administration. Union leaders objected last month when the president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness recommended lowering tax rates to internationally competitive levels. Meanwhile, Obama’s call for a “basic minimum” tax on worldwide earnings could thwart any kind of consensus with Republicans on reforming the code.

Until the administration discloses more specifics around its 2013 budget proposal in a couple of weeks — like what the rate might be — Republican lawmakers and business leaders are reserving judgment. But not surprisingly, they have serious concerns.

Many congressional Republicans and several corporate executives on Obama’s own jobs council want the government to adopt some kind of territorial tax system, where the United States would not tax income earned outside its borders.

A territorial system would let companies bring foreign earnings home without being required to pay as much as 35 percent to the government. Business profits totaling $1.4 trillion are trapped overseas to avoid those taxes, according to JPMorgan Chase.

“If the rate is too high and the administration doesn’t intend to move to a territorial system like nearly all of our global competitors, then it is tough to imagine how this benefits American companies and the workers who we want to hire here at home,” a Republican congressional staffer told POLITICO.

The White House and congressional Republicans support the general idea of lowering corporate rates and eliminating some deductions to broaden the tax base. But because of the nation’s burgeoning deficit, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says companies shouldn’t count on a massive windfall from any changes.

“When we do tax reform, we’re going to have to be helping contribute to deficit reduction,” Geithner said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” “We don’t have the ability of offering the American people or the American businesspeople community a net tax cut.”

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Bid to tax global profits political?