A few months ago, a Senate committee grilled Apple CEO Tim Cook over the company’s creative accounting strategies, accusing it of cheating the U.S. Treasury by stashing away billions of dollars that live in no tax jurisdiction at all. The company didn’t dispute the truth of the accusations, but blamed the United States for building a tax system that makes bringing overseas earnings back to the United States very expensive, and proposed simplified rules that would make it cheaper to do so.

The problem isn’t unique to the United States. Over the past few decades, as corporations have gotten more multinational and earned more money from intangible goods, it’s become easier to shift profits around the world to achieve the lowest possible tax rates. That leads to “base erosion,” wherein cash-strapped countries have less economic value around to tax. And it’s a really hard problem for one country to solve by itself: Tightening tax rules for the purpose of capturing more revenue will only incentivize companies to pick up their headquarters and leave, not unlike the quandary states must face when deciding whether to raise tax rates above their neighbors’.

The 34-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has been working on this problem for a while now. In February, they issued a comprehensive report on how companies have found ways to game the international tax system (also known as “aggressive tax planning“). And last week, they marched forward with an “Action Plan” that sets out 15 steps for stopping it.

They’re hardly concrete proposals, so it’s difficult to say what exactly they would mean for American companies (and indeed, they would affect different industries in different ways). But here are a few of the major ones, with the help of a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis to sort out the tax policy gobbledegook:

Eliminate double non-taxation: Sure, taxation by multiple countries that claim the same chunk of a company’s profits is a headache. But so is double non-taxation, where a company finds a way to shift revenue untaxed by its home country to a country that also doesn’t tax it, in what’s called a “hybrid mismatch.” The OECD thinks countries should harmonize their tax systems to make sure that doesn’t happen.

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