Apple’s saving $9.2 billion in potential taxes by financing a chunk of its recently-announced $50 billion stock buyback via debt, Bloomberg says.

With the $10 billion share repurchase announcement made last year, the entire $60 billion stock buyback is the largest share repurchase plan in history, and will take until 2015. The problem is that most of Apple’s cash — some $100 billion U.S. — is overseas. And bringing that loot home would result in taxation at a 35 percent rate.

$35 billion extra in government coffers probably gives Washington hot flashes and sweaty palms, but it keeps Apple accountants awake at night. So the company is borrowing the cash it needs by issuing a record $17 billion bond offering with interest yields slightly higher than U.S. treasuries.

Borrowing money, paradoxically, is saving Apple money.

In addition, Bloomberg notes, interest Apple pays on the $17 billion debt financing will be tax-deductible, saving an additional $100 million a year.

This raises all kinds of issues about the ethics and morality of not repatriating cash and thereby avoiding taxes. Apple is not the only tech company that uses creative methods to reduce income tax payments — Google has a surprising $10 billion worth of revenue in tiny Bermuda, thanks to shell companies and wily sales of intellectual property. As a result, the search giant’s effective tax rate on overseas income is a ridiculous 3.2 percent.

And 50 other tech companies, including Microsoft, have collectively dodged $225 billion in U.S. taxes by sheltering their assets overseas.

The bigger question, at least for Apple investors, is whether propping up its own share price is a good use of Apple’s massive $150 billion in cash reserves. Other options, of course, include accelerating innovation — the company won’t release a significant new product in two quarters — or acquiring companies that could help it grow faster.

Share buybacks are typically done by companies who feel undervalued by the market. Perhaps Apple should be making moves to address that problem, rather than treating the symptom.

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SurveyMonkey makes it simple to create web surveys. It offers tools to design surveys, collect responses, and analyze the data. The company has been around since 1999 and now has more than 14 million users, including huge Fortune 100 brands like Facebook, Audi, and Samsung. The business runs on a subscription model and generates significant profits.

Despite its solid numbers, SurveyMonkey does not have plans to go public. It initiated this “debt and equity recapitalization” to give employees and investors the opportunity to cash out.

“There are a lot of good reasons to go public, but we don’t have them,” said CEO Dave Goldberg in an interview with VentureBeat. “Liquidity is the only reason, and we were able to do this transaction and get people liquidity without going public. We felt if we could raise this money privately and stay private, that it was a better outcome for the company and still good for the shareholder.”

All of the $800 million will go to shareholders, as SurveyMonkey has enough cash to support its own growth and acquisition agenda. Goldberg led this round in conjunction with Tiger Global Management at a valuation of $1.35 billion. Google Inc (not Google Ventures) is also becoming a shareholder. Google is a strategic investor that will be instrumental in supporting SurveyMonkey’s plans for international expansion.

Goldberg said that this is a “pretty unusual” transaction for a Silicon Valley company and was complicated to orchestrate. While many companies are shying away from IPOs or seeking secondary financing, this type of deal on this scope is not feasible for a majority of Internet businesses.

SurveyMonkey, however, has enough consistent revenue that investors and shareholders are comfortable with debt financing because they know it will be paid back. SurveyMonkey raised $100 million in debt financing in 2010, led by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. The debt portion of this $800 million round is anticipated to close in February. It will bring the total capital raised, across equity and debt financing, to $900 million.

NXT Capital Venture Finance has put together a $500 million fund that will provide venture loans to emerging growth companies.

NXT targets companies in the technology and life science fields. It offers loans ranging from $1 million to $20 million to both seed and late stage businesses. This current fund establishes a capital base that NXT can use to make investments over the next couple years.

Group Head Jan Haas said venture debt offers a flexible, friendly alternative to equity investments. With a shrinking venture capital market and a longer lifecycle surrounding exits, loans can offer companies the support they need to become cash-flow positive or go public with less compromise.

“An uncertain IPO window, longer exits and other pressures are increasing demand for alternative sources of capital,” he said in a statement. “This significant additional funding will allow NXT Venture Finance to provide less-dilutive, more flexible funds to help emerging growth companies succeed.”

NXT Capital Venture Finance has offices in Boston and Silicon Valley. It is the venture arm of NXT Capital, which is based in Chicago and has offices around the US. NXT was founded in 2006 and has invested $3.2 billion across 142 transactions to date.

Consider sweat equity first

SurveyMonkey gives websites and other companies a cheap way to create and distribute surveys online. There’s a free option for casual users — say a student looking to create a survey for a class — that has a cap on the number of people that can respond. The premium monthly subscription lets users brand their own surveys and lifts the cap on the number of respondents.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company’s main business is monthly subscription plans that allow for more responses and a deeper analytics suite for each survey. SurveyMonkey handles more than 25 million surveys each month, according to the company. It expanded from web surveys to phone polling in June this year after it acquired Precision Polling, and its customers include all of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 100 list.

The company will use the new funding to expand its business, including some M&A activity, and other corporate purposes like purchasing servers. This is a peculiar step for a web startup, since the lion’s share of startups typically stick to equity financing. That means they raise capital from firms by selling off certain portions of their company in the form of stock.

Debt financing, on the other hand, is a guarantee to pay back the debt with a certain interest rate. It’s equivalent to the sale of government bonds and treasuries that have a fixed interest rate. Secured debt like bonds are typically a safer investment than equity because there is a guarantee to be paid back in the event a company goes under.

These are some pretty heavy-hitting banks — so that could be a testament to the company’s performance. JP Morgan Chase Bank, Webster Bank and Royal Bank of Canada also participated in the round.

SurveyMonkey was founded in 1999.

[Photo: peretzpup]