Interesting article this afternoon from Bloomberg: The Naked Truth About Tax Deductions.  Here is the opening:

You may not mind that executives on the expense account dole can pass their time in pursuit of the best pole dance east of San Francisco Bay. It may not even bother you if a company — whose stock you might own — reimburses the executives who entertain customers at the Penthouse Executive Club in New York or the chain of Rick’s Cabaret strip joints.

But how do you feel about a company stacking up all those strip-club expenses and writing them off as business deductions? Open-minded is one thing, but isn’t it a little over the top when the average taxpayer is helping underwrite nights out for executives whose idea of hard work is to flirt with the gold-medal winners of surgically enhanced women?

Just think about it: You can cut your tax bill if you buy a lap dance at a strip joint. "If someone wants to pay $7 a drink to see people without their clothes on, why should we pay for it?" says Robert S. McIntyre, director of the Center for Tax Justice, a Washington-based advocacy group. McIntyre, a man clearly out of touch with the going rate for strip-joint cocktails, says he feels the same way about all corporate deductions for meals and entertainment, which he estimated take about $5 billion off the tax rolls each year.

The issue made headlines when Robert McCormick, the former chief executive officer of Savvis Inc., was named as a defendant in a lawsuit brought by American Express Co. AmEx said in a lawsuit filed in October that McCormick used his corporate card to spend $241,000 in a one-night spree at a strip club in October 2003, but never paid his bill.