Washington

MINNEAPOLIS — The highway trust fund will face another funding crisis by August, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman James Oberstar warned at a town hall here yesterday.

Dan Gallagher, deputy director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s trading and markets division, plans to leave at the end of the week to become a partner at WilmerHale here.

WASHINGTON — North Carolina securities regulators plan this week to begin work on a centralized auction-rate securities research center that will collect progress reports on how Wall Street and other dealer firms are fulfilling the “best effort” commitments they made to provide liquidity to institutional investors still holding illiquid ARS.

SAN ANTONIO — Legislation recently introduced in Congress suggests that traditional tax-credit bonds may be replaced by bonds offering Build America Bond-style direct subsidies to issuers, an Internal Revenue Service attorney said last week.

The U.S. Department of Energy has extended its deadline to Jan. 29 from Jan. 15 for receiving responses to a request for information from state development finance agencies that want to participate in a new federal loan guarantee program.

WASHINGTON — Municipal securities dealers, their finance professionals, and political action committees will have to disclose most contributions they make to bond ballot election campaigns under Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board rule changes the Securities and Exchange Commission approved Wednesday.

WASHINGTON — Harvard University has been tapped for one of roughly 40 audits the Internal Revenue Service is conducting this year to examine the financial and business practices of tax-exempt colleges and universities.

WASHINGTON — Market participants worried yesterday that the Obama administration’s plan to limit the size and certain trading activities of banks could adversely affect firms’ tender option bond programs, which provide money market funds with safe municipal investments.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s ruling allowing corporations to use their own funds for ads to support or oppose candidates does not appear to have implications for the Municipal ­Securities Rulemaking Board’s Rule G-37, which ­restricts municipal dealers’ political ­contributions to issuer officials, lawyers said.

WASHINGTON — A Wells Fargo & Co. shareholder has filed suit against 13 top officials at the bank, alleging they committed a breach of fiduciary duty, abuse of control, and gross mismanagement by permitting the bank to continue to participate in sale-in, lease-out transactions after the federal government warned they were illegitimate tax shelters.

WASHINGTON — In a new challenge to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement jurisdiction over certain swaps, attorneys for two former JPMorgan bankers that secured swap transactions for the firm with Jefferson County, Ala., are urging a federal judge to throw out most of the securities fraud charges the SEC filed against them in November.

WASHINGTON — The Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing next month on the creation of a national infrastructure bank, chairman Christopher J. Dodd said yesterday.

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.

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.

WASHINGTON ­— Though state regulators were swifter and more aggressive than their federal counterparts in responding to abuses that led to the 2008 collapse of the auction-rate securities market, they could have played a larger role in preventing the crisis if their authority had not been preempted by Congress, the head of a regulator group warned yesterday.