Dumping Companies

Corporate greed is getting out of hand, and Mark Cuban isn't going to take it anymore.

The billionaire investor and owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks took to Twitter Friday morning to shame companies for moving offshore to buck taxes.

The Mavericks owner is known for his loud and sometimes distasteful comments. His latest comments are pretty docile in comparison. His message: If I don't like the way you do business, I'm going to take my business elsewhere.

Cuban's rant came the day after President Obama

voiced his own opposition to a tax-avoidance scheme called an inversion, in which a U.S. company establishes or merges with a foreign company and moves its headquarters overseas to avoid paying U.S. taxes. 

The Obama administration has put pressure on Congress to close this loophole, which according to CNBC could cost the government up to $20 billion in the next 10 years.

Aside from physically moving their headquarters offshore, many major companies also simply stash overseas profits offshore to avoid paying tax on that income. General Electric leads all other U.S. companies in that regard with $110 billion overseas.

The largest U.S.-based companies added $206 billion to their stockpiles of offshore profits last year, parking earnings in low-tax countries until Congress gives them a reason not to.

Multinational have accumulated $1.95 trillion outside the U.S., up 11.8 percent from a year earlier, according to securities filings from 307 corporations reviewed by Bloomberg News. 

Three U.S.-based companies --Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Apple Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. -- added $37.5 billion, or 18.2 percent of the total increase.

“The loopholes in our tax code right now give such a big reward to companies that use gimmicks to make it look like they earn their profits offshore,” saidDan Smith, a tax and budget advocate at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which seeks to counteract corporate influence.

Unfortunately, if you put your money into something like a 401(k), its pretty hard to stop investing in companies that avoid paying taxes, either by inversion or by keeping money outside of the country. 

The odds are high that at least some of your mutual funds invest in GE, Apple, Microsoft and others

that top the list of companies with the most money offshore. You also probably don't have the deep pockets and investment managers that Cuban has to help him.