Peter Schroeder

A position the Internal Revenue Service is taking regarding $150 million of student-loan revenue bonds under audit could have ramifications for the entire tax-exempt student loan bond industry, market participants said last week.

WASHINGTON — A bond provision in a recently unveiled climate change bill appears to be broader than intended and would allow electric cooperatives and potentially the federal government to serve as conduit borrowers on tax-exempt and Build America Bond deals.

Two senators last night unveiled a bill that would make the $30 million small-issuer limit for bank-qualified bonds permanent and index it to ­inflation.

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service are seeking public input on which projects should be included on the 2010-2011 priority guidance list.

The Hood River Valley Parks and Recreation District in Oregon has disclosed that it is entering into the Internal Revenue Service’s voluntary closing agreement program to protect the tax-exempt status of $2.5 million of general obligation bonds it sold in 1998.

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt bond office this fiscal year plans to close 1,200 examinations — more than double its all time high of 581, its director says.

The Internal Revenue Service has found that the vast majority of colleges and universities have endowment funds invested in a wide range of securities.

In what could be a first of it’s kind action in the municipal bond market, the Internal Revenue Service has suspended tax-exempt bond attorney Michael W. McCall for at least 24 months from practicing before it for writing a false tax opinion.

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., has introduced legislation that would exempt all water and sewer exempt facility debt from the private-activity bond volume cap.

WASHINGTON — Congress could save billions of dollars by prohibiting tax-exempt colleges and universities from earning arbitrage indirectly through endowments that are invested at higher interest rates than what they are paying on their tax-exempt bonds, the Congressional Budget Office concluded in a report.

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has raised the possibility of including a provision to extend the Build America Bonds program in an “extenders” package, which lawmakers hope to approve by Memorial Day weekend.

After telling state and local officials that there was nothing they could do to adjust a much-maligned formula used to allocate $25 billion of recovery zone bonds, Treasury Department officials are now referring the governments to legislation pending in the Senate that would allocate another $25 billion of the bonds using new criteria.

The National Association of Bond Lawyers is urging Congress to fix a number of glitches and provisions with unintended consequences that it has identified in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act enacted last February.

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department released interim guidance yesterday instructing municipal issuers how to issue four tax-credit bonds as direct-subsidy bonds, as was authorized by a jobs law enacted in March.

Four major municipal market groups yesterday urged the Treasury Department to immediately issue interim guidance on how to determine issue price for Build America Bonds, warning that confusion surrounding the topic is having a “chilling effect” on the still-developing market.

New-issue prices for Build America Bonds remain a hot topic among municipal market participants, as several market groups last week were weighing asking the Treasury Department for clarification on the subject.

The Internal Revenue Service is auditing $445 million of industrial development revenue refunding bonds issued by Campbell County, Wyo., in 2007 in connection with a waste-coal power plant now set to be completed in 2013, five years later than originally proposed.

Louisiana disclosed this week that it has been providing information to the Internal Revenue Service for the last 13 months as part of an ongoing audit of $650 million of general obligation refunding bonds it sold in 2005.

WASHINGTON — A lawmaker and a Treasury Department official Thursday pushed for a permanent extension of the Build America Bond program, but acknowledged that the greatest obstacle is finding a way to pay for it.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Ron Wyden, who recently caused a stir in the municipal bond market by proposing a tax-reform bill that would eliminate tax-exempt bonds and replace them with tax-credit bonds, said yesterday he is open to discussing possible modifications to the legislation with critics.