Canadian and European oil companies will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage to their American rivals if U.S. lawmakers scrap tighter transparency requirements on the industry, as expected, according to company executives, legal experts and trade groups.

The U.S. Senate is poised to overturn the so-called “resource extraction rule”, a regulation requiring U.S. natural resources companies to disclose taxes and other payments to foreign governments.

The rule is among a handful of regulations ushered in during the final months of Barack Obama’s presidency that Republican lawmakers – who now control Congress – have targeted as being overly burdensome and bad for the U.S. economy. Democrats have no way to keep the law in place as Republicans need only a simple majority to kill the measure, according to Reuters.

But overturning the regulation, set to take effect next year, would leave Canadian and European natural resource companies with the most-stringent reporting standards in the world for payments to foreign governments – as U.S. behemoths like Exxon Mobil Corp and Chevron Corp get a reprieve.

Certain details of contract negotiations and terms of bids to access reserves are currently required under regulations now in place in both Canada and Europe. Such information could reveal to competitors negotiating tactics and other metrics that many companies consider proprietary, observers say.

“It definitely could put Canada at a disadvantage because we are fairly stringent on our rules, both domestically and internationally, on how our companies operate,” said Mark Salkeld, chief executive officer of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, an industry trade group.

European oil company Royal Dutch Shell Plc, meanwhile, pointed out that a reversal in the United States would go against the broader global trend toward transparency in the notoriously murky industry.

“The trend that we have, with access to information, with bringing distant countries into our space all the time, we will have to live with that. I don’t think any single political system can turn that around,” CEO Ben van Beurden told reporters when asked about the proposed change in U.S. regulation.