Naomi Jagoda

The American Bar Association's taxation section warned the IRS and Treasury Department that their proposed issue price rules will upend long established market practices and increase uncertainty for issuers and other market participants.

Existing home sales rose 1.0% to a seasonally adjusted 4.87 million-unit rate in December from a revised 4.82 million pace the previous month, the National Association of Realtors announced Thursday.

Identical bills introduced in the House and the Senate would make permanent the federal payments in lieu of taxes program, a key source of funds for counties and local governments.

Internal Revenue Service auditors will no longer able to conclude there is automatic conflict of interest when lawyers who served as bond counsel in a transaction represent the issuer before the IRS in an examination of the bonds.

Industrial production rose 0.3% in December, while capacity utilization increased to 79.2%, the Federal Reserve reported Friday.

The approach taken to funding public defined-benefit pension plans is "deeply flawed," a research group said Thursday in a report that urged the federal government and Congress to consider ways to make sure public pension systems function better.

The nation's governors support maintaining the tax exemption for municipal bonds, though tax reform appears to be unlikely this year, leaders of the National Governors Association said Wednesday.

House and Senate appropriators unveiled a $1.012 trillion bipartisan omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2014 late Monday that would provide funds for transportation and many other programs but not high speed rail.

Congress should reexamine the Tower Amendment to see if the Securities and Exchange Commission should get the ability to require municipal bond issuers to comply with more disclosure requirements and robust accounting standards, the State Budget Crisis Task Force recommended Tuesday in its final report.

The Internal Revenue Service has closed an audit of $21.13 million of tax-exempt contract revenue refunding bonds issued by the Canyon Regional Water Authority in Texas in 2006 with no change to the bonds' tax-exempt status. However, it advised the authority that it had not completely filled out an IRS form.

The federal government ran a $53.2 billion surplus in December, the Treasury Department reported Monday.

Consumer credit increased by $12.3 billion, or 4.8%, in November to $3.087 trillion, the Federal Reserve reported Wednesday.

Many members of the Federal Open Market Committee believed that the committee needed to "proceed cautiously" in beginning to taper its asset purchases and signal that additional reductions in the pace of purchases would be done in "measured steps," according to minutes of the panel's December meeting, released Wednesday.

The Internal Revenue Service has preliminarily concluded that $35.38 million of bonds issued in 2008 by the Burnet County, Tex. Public Facility Corp. to finance a jail are taxable.

The Internal Revenue Service has concluded that $720 million of student-loan bonds issued by a New Hampshire authority are taxable, leading the issuer to move toward requesting an administrative appeal and asking the IRS to reopen its audits of the bonds.

A proposal for energy tax reform unveiled by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus would not allow new clean renewable energy bonds and qualified energy conservation bonds to be issued after Dec. 31, 2016.

Rebecca Harrigal, the new director of the Internal Revenue Service's tax-exempt bond office, said one of her goals is to streamline and improve the closing agreement or settlement process.

Municipal bond market participants, on guard against proposals to limit or eliminate the tax exemption, doubt 2014 will bring comprehensive tax reform.

State budgets seem to be "stabilizing and settling into a period of modest growth," but recovery from the Great Recession is still "a work in progress," a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures found.

Existing home sales fell 4.3% to a seasonally adjusted 4.90 million-unit rate in November from an unrevised 5.12 million pace the previous month, the National Association of Realtors announced Thursday.