Washington

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.

WASHINGTON — The Joint Tax Committee is estimating that the wildly popular Build America Bond program will cost $12.5 billion from fiscal 2009 through fiscal 2013.

In her state of the state address Tuesday, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire urged lawmakers to consider new revenue to protect key programs.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration provided state and local housing finance agencies with a total of $23.5 billion of assistance under bond purchase and liquidity programs that have run their course, the Treasury Department announced yesterday.

The Obama administration is working with Congress on a multi-year transportation bill that it expects will cost between $400 billion to $500 billion, Transportation Department Secretary Ray LaHood said at a conference here yesterday.

WASHINGTON — In the biggest reorganization of its enforcement division in 30 years, the Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday announced the new heads of five specialized enforcement units, including Elaine Greenberg, who will lead a unit expected to boost enforcement of municipal securities and public pension abuses.

WASHINGTON — Two environmental groups critical of coal-fired electric plants are urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to encourage broker-dealers that underwrite municipal bonds for such projects to provide more disclosure about the regulatory and fiscal changes stemming from climate change.

Seven groups representing state securities regulators, investors, and investment advisers are urging leaders of the Senate Banking Committee not to water down language in its draft financial regulatory reform legislation that would require every individual that provides investment advice to be held to a fiduciary duty under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940.

WASHINGTON — Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary E. Peters joined a push by House lawmakers yesterday to revamp the federal transportation funding system, which currently has “donor states” such as Texas paying more into the federal highway trust fund than they get back.

The Court of Federal Claims has rejected Wells Fargo & Co.’s attempt to claim a $115 million tax deduction stemming from 26 sale-in, lease-out transactions, 17 of which involved public transit agencies, saying that the deals lacked economic substance.

WASHINGTON — Persistent declines in tax revenue continued to pummel states for another three months, making the third fiscal quarter the fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit declines, according to a Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government report issued yesterday.