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"Our e-Residency program provides many benefits for legitimate entrepreneurs -- such as remote management, lower cost of business services, access to the EU market, and access to a wider choice of e-services, but avoiding tax responsibilities is not one of them. In fact, many e-residents make a larger tax contribution to their home country as a result of their increased profitability by using the program," Dmitri Jegorov, deputy secretary general for tax and customs policy at the Estonian Finance Ministry, said in the e-Residency blog.

According to Jegorov, it's important to note that e-Residency is not a right, but a privilege that Estonia can offer to screened and identified people who wish to join our digital nation without living here. Residency can be revoked -- and already has been -- in order to protect the benefits of the program only for those that wish to use them legitimately.

"Understandably, tax evaders do not like any of this. That helps explain why only 2 percent of applications for e-Residency have to be rejected. Those with bad intentions shouldn't waste their time applying, nor the price they pay in advance for their own background checks," the official added.

Estonia does not aspire to be a tax haven and -- in addition to moral objections -- would not benefit from becoming one nor be able to adequately serve its e-resident population if it did so, Jegorov said.

In his words, Estonia benefits from e-Residency in a wide variety of ways without encouraging e-residents to pay their taxes to our country. Some companies run by e-residents do have their permanent residence here and so they legitimately pay taxes here. The amount they have contributed is already higher than the amount invested in the program, but this is still a relatively small fraction of the contribution made to Estonia by e-residents.

"Ultimately, a tax haven is only able to minimize a company's tax bill by up to 100 percent, but that is useless if a company is not able to grow. Estonia would rather be an administrative haven and offer all the advantages of Estonia's trusted business environment which has the potential to help entrepreneurs conduct business globally with greater ease," Jegorov said.

An independent analysis by Deloitte has discovered that the program is projected to return 100 euros to Estonia's state and economy in exchange for every one euro that was invested in the program.