If what you describe is true (which I don't think), then it would be theft, not money laundering or writing off business expenses. Considering how most of the time these companies only accept cryptocurrency or wire transfers I don't see how this would be feasible. I could see over-ordering servers for cryptonight mining, but when you are ordering 150k worth of equipment, then suddenly wiring $50k to China, that raises red flags
people get really creative when something like mining (set and forget it) can be sending them money.. I've been at places where an IT guy had the wool over the company to the point that he just took half the equipment out of their rack and put it in another rack in the same co-location to set up his own business and just kept saying that yeah, you got redundancy, disaster recovery, yadda yadda since they had no one to actually check until I joined them and had to make their jaws drop on the blatant arrogance
I got out of serious mining in 2014 when I started seeing prices make no sense and was way beyond the 'stupid noob ebay fool' and had to be just plane graft
And yes, I can see someone running their own business and adding miners that have nothing to do with their business and write it off like it does and not claim any BTC on their taxes.. with these prices it is the only thing that actually makes sense unless you really are laundering money which is whole other level
ROI on a miner should only be 4 months tops.. if the prices paid make it 12 months? a whole year to hope to get your money back and then what profit on top of that? Perhaps using a 0% credit card to convert the money you paid into bitcoin via the miner without having to go through the spotlight of Coinbase? Sure that is another valid reason but if you are paying for the miner in BTC just to hope to get the same BTC back in a year with no other way of tilting the system in your favor.. why bother?