Maven Plugin ignores inherited profiles

I love how the Maven plug in gives you access to profiles! However the feature falls short when I have profiles defined in an inherited pom that is not directly part of the project. For eg. I had all my profiles defined in the root pom of a multi-module project. When I moved them up into a team wide shared pom to be used across other projects they disappeared from the Maven window. I was entertaining the idea of defining place-holder dummy profiles back in the root pom of my multi-module project just to make them show up but I don't know if these would shadow the inherited pom profiles or what other ramifications that would bring. Any ideas?