Washington

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department should permanently apply existing regulations on issue price to all tax-exempt and direct-pay bonds, while clarifying several aspects of the rules, according to the American Bar Association’s taxation section.

WASHINGTON — The Securities and Exchange Commission should rein in the American Bankers Association’s CUSIP Service Bureau and prevent it from charging market participants unreasonable and unwarranted fees, according to three trade groups.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is warning the incoming Republican governors of two Midwestern states that unless they use certain grant funding for high-speed rail projects, they will lose the funds entirely.

President Obama’s bipartisan fiscal reform commission cited a tax-reform bill that would eliminate tax-exempt bonds and replace them with tax-credit bonds as a potential way forward when it comes to simplifying the tax code and reducing the federal deficit, according to a draft proposal released Wednesday.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has fined Goldman, Sachs & Co. $650,000 for failing to disclose that two of its registered representatives, including Fabrice Tourre, received “Wells Notices” from the Securities and Exchange ­Commission.

MIAMI — Legislation authorizing a national infrastructure bank could see renewed momentum this month as the Obama administration begins to prepare its fiscal 2012 budget.

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s municipal securities division honored Colin MacNaught, the assistant treasurer for debt management in the Massachusetts treasurer’s office, with its 2010 Honor Roll Award at a luncheon Tuesday.

MIAMI — Two senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee, including the panel’s outgoing ranking Republican, are calling for a gradual increase of the gasoline tax by 25 cents over three years.

WASHINGTON — Industry groups are urging the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board to abandon a proposal to alter its Rule G-37 that would require municipal securities dealers to disclose the names of political action committees controlled by bank holding companies or other affiliates.

Robert Dean Pope, a partner at Hunton & Williams in Richmond, Va., was elected president of the American College of Bond Counsel at the group's annual meeting late last month in San Antonio.

Securities and Exchange Commission member Elisse Walter wants Congress to do away with the exemptions for municipal debt in the federal securities laws, but probably would not want the SEC to collect bond documents from issuers prior to issuance, according to bond attorneys familiar with the matter.

The prospects for a comprehensive climate-change bill favored by public power utilities is presumed dead following Tuesday's election because Republicans, who will control the House in January, have opposed such measures, sources said Thursday.

The Internal Revenue Service has completed an audit of $67.6 million of bonds issued by Washington's Vancouver Downtown Redevelopment Authority in 2003 with no change to the bonds' tax-exempt status, the issuer disclosed this week.

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service announced Wednesday that it is giving tribal governments until the end of 2011 to issue the first $1 billion tranche of tribal economic development bonds, in an effort to save the tribes from having to forfeit any unused allocations at year-end.

Lawmakers will go back to the drawing board for a multi-year transportation bill when Republicans take over leadership of the House in January, but market participants think such a bill may have a chance of squeezing through a divided Congress next year.

The Securities and Exchange Commission unanimously agreed to propose rules for establishing a broad whistleblower program less than a week after an SEC attorney said the agency has obtained numerous queries from muni market participants interested in reporting abuses for awards.

WASHINGTON — Municipal borrowers are much slower than corporations to complete annual audited financial reports, confirming many analysts’ claims that muni issuers’ annual financial disclosures are often stale, a new report shows.

If a state authority issues bonds to pay catastrophe insurance claims, they would not qualify as private-activity bonds because they would be backed with generally applicable taxes and not private payments, the Internal Revenue Service concluded in a recent private-letter ruling.

The Internal Revenue Service is seeking applicants for a tax-exempt bond expert to join its Advisory Committee on Tax-Exempt and Government Entities.

WASHINGTON — The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission the first batch of proposals to extend to municipal advisers its rules on fair-dealing, disciplinary actions and administrative requirements.