These are the moments when you would really like to be a fly in the room where Jamie Dimon’s corporate lawyers sit around with the boss and ponder: how can we screw the public today? And, baby, every day they come up with a new one.

You remember those fines JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay — fines that would be paid not from Jamie’s pocket but from the corporate treasury? Well, turns out those geniuses have figured out how to make sure a pile of that money is tax deductible (Wall Street Journal pay wall):

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.’s $5.1 billion settlement with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be entirely tax deductible for the bank, according to a person familiar with the situation—effectively lessening the bank’s true payout and shifting part of the settlement’s cost to taxpayers.

The ability to deduct the cost of the settlement could save J.P. Morgan nearly $1.5 billion in taxes, based on the bank’s 29.1% effective tax rate for the first half of 2013. It isn’t known whether J.P. Morgan will actually go ahead and take the deduction.

The bank could save yet more if other parts of its tentative $13 billion settlement with the government over alleged mortgage-bond abuses are also deemed tax-deductible—an issue that J.P. Morgan and regulators have discussed and that has been noted by outside analysts.

Scammers. Though you have to give them credit for evil genius.