Tropical Tax Evasion

Many businesses minimize their U.S. tax bills by sending credit-card receipts to Aruba, the Cayman Islands, and other business-friendly havens. For several years the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) is investigating how $100 billion a year in credit-card receipts are escaping U.S. sales and income taxes and whether the spreading credit-card practice amounts to illegal behaviour. According Daniel Reeves, the IRS special agent leading the probe, "a number of U.S. taxpayers may be under-reporting income, evading taxes, and breaking the law" by sending card receipts offshore.

Companies that route card revenue offshore say what they do is entirely lawful and appropriate. They typically note that they do not have to charge their customers any American sales tax because they have incorporated overseas. The companies say that they notify the IRS of this arrangement. They also maintain that eventually they pay income tax on any money they bring back to the U.S. Tax experts say that if businesses take all of these steps, they are indeed operating within the law. However the IRS suspects that a lot of the offshore credit-card activity isn't, in fact, reported and that repatriated funds frequently escape income taxation.
The businesses that indeed are escaping taxes by not accurately reporting the amount of money stashed in foreign bank accounts face a moral dilemma. Because on the one hand the purpose of a business is to maximize profit, which is enhanced by paying the least amount of tax. On the other hand it is not ethical to profit from the benefits of a country while not paying the appropriate amount of taxes. The question whether these actions are permitted by law or not is not important in this ethical dilemma, the most important factor is whether the gained benefits a company received from activities in a country are in proportion to (or at least close to) the taxes paid to this country. So when these companies are taking large benefits from the U.S. while paying minimal taxes (by loopholes, tropical accounts etc.) these activities are morally wrong.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_08/b4167046022885.htm