> The crime is what's legal, and what's legal is
> decided by the Congress.
It's not clear to me that this is "legal" ... it's a loophole, because it takes advantage of a situation that was clearly spelled-out in the law -- if you make money, you pay tax on it, unless you pay tax to someone else, then we figure out what's fair -- and probably isn't exploitable by many. But the sheer size of the dollars involved makes it worth it to try, even if your CEO gets put in front of a Senate Committee.
The way you can tell how bad this smells is that they are 'warehousing' the profits offshore, hoping for a 'repatriation discount' -- the money is truely no good to them where it is, and they know it. And they know that if they bring it back to the US, where it could at least be used to repurchase stock, or pay a dividend (not that either of those things is any good for the rest of us), they will get taxed on it.
So they are in effect holding out for a better deal.
Which doesn't make it legal.
/jordan