Far West

Fredric D. Firestone, an associate director of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission who spearheaded the SEC’s auction-rate securities investigations, will leave at the end February to become a partner at McDermott, Will & Emery in Washington.

The National Congress of American Indians is urging Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to look into the Internal Revenue Service’s “unequal treatment of tribal government entities” for projects financed with tax-exempt bonds.

In an effort to help educate investors, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board yesterday issued a “fact sheet” containing seven questions they can ask their financial professionals when considering investing in municipal bonds.

WASHINGTON — While the National Federation of Municipal Analysts is willing to work with issuer and other market groups to promote improvements to the timeliness and quality of municipal disclosure, additional changes to the current regulations are crucial to ensure their adoption throughout the market, the NFMA’s new chairman said last week.

The Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt bond branch will have to remain watchful that bond programs authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are not used beyond their legal limits, according to a report released yesterday by the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration.

A nonprofit student loan bond issuer has been granted a 45-day extension to make a carryforward election of its unused private-activity bond volume capacity by the Internal Revenue Service, after a personnel shake-up at the corporation resulted in a failure to file the paperwork on time.

Standard & Poor’s downgrade of California last week raises a crucial question: does the Golden State’s debt at some point become no longer appropriate for conservative retail investors?

SAN FRANCISCO — Efforts in California to develop community choice aggregation as an alternative path to public power have been slow to get off the ground.

SAN FRANCISCO — The San Diego County Water Authority, California’s third-largest urban water agency, this week plans to price $639 million of water revenue bonds, including its first Build America Bonds.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. fined Southwest Securities Inc. $54,500 and ordered it to pay $23,394 to customers for municipal securities trade reporting and pricing violations as well as non-muni violations. FINRA also fined San-Francisco-based Charles Schwab & Co. $25,000 for muni trade reporting violations.