Tax

The Internal Revenue Service is conducting an audit of the Philadelphia School District, officials have confirmed.

DALLAS — A temporary one-cent sales tax increase approved by Arizona voters in May 2010 has produced $100 million less than originally projected and failed to prevent $454 million in cuts to education and a $564 million rollback in health care spending, according to state reports.

WASHINGTON — Washington State lawmakers in the House and Senate have introduced legislation to create $3 billion of qualified forest conservation bonds that could be used to help spur public-private partnership financing of sustainable ecosystems.

WASHINGTON — The District of Columbia’s budget vote last Wednesday jolted local municipal bond investors who could see their taxes jump on Oct. 1 as a result of a provision to tax the interest earnings from munis issued outside the district.

The Internal Revenue Service is sending out questionnaires to 300 issuers asking about their advance-refunding procedures and post-issuance compliance.

DALLAS — Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which limits the ability of state and local government to raise taxes and issue debt, violates the U.S. Constitution, according to a lawsuit seeking to overturn the voter-approved law.

WASHINGTON — Congressional interest in municipal securities has increased significantly at a time when the issuer community does not appear to be as cohesive as it has been in the past, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board’s executive director said this week.

SAN ANTONIO — Government officials are sweating the risk that they will lose the tax-exemption for muni bonds, worrying that the market for tax-credit bonds — an alternative to tax-exempts posed by some members of Congress — won’t work as well.

SAN ANTONIO — State and local governments dodged a bullet again on the 3% withholding requirement when earlier this month the Internal Revenue Service postponed its start date until 2013.

The Internal Revenue Service has revised its Form 8038 for private-activity bonds, asking issuers now to provide more specific information about their guaranteed investment contracts and hedges.

The Toledo-Lucas Port Authority entered into a closing agreement with the Internal Revenue Service to preserve the tax-exempt status for $3.5 million of 2005 bonds after the IRS found they were taxable.

Medicare’s trust fund will run out of money in 2024 and Social Security’s will be exhausted in 2036, according to the annual reports of their boards of trustees released Friday.

Federal legislation introduced last week would prohibit states and localities from collecting taxes on certain electronic transactions, but governmental officials are worried about the revenue losses and the precedent the law would set.

Legislation has been introduced in both the House and Senate that would exempt water and sewer bonds from states’ private-activity volume caps.

WASHINGTON — The Bartram Park Community Development District in Jacksonville, Fla., has received an audit notice from the Internal Revenue Service for $28.7 million of special assessment municipal bonds issued in 2005.

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt bond office has received referrals of around 30 whistleblower claims of potential abuses in the municipal bond market, an official said Friday.

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Market experts on Thursday painted a bleak picture of the municipal securities market over the next few years, saying the high bond volume of the past six years is gone and unlikely to return.

WASHINGTON — House Ways and Means Committee panel members, researchers, and muni market participants debated the merits and faults of a public-pension disclosure bill Thursday at a hearing that also focused on tax-exempt financing and pension obligation bonds.

WASHINGTON — Though several deficit-cutting commissions are recommending Congress and the Obama administration overhaul the tax code and cut tax expenditures, such as the tax-exempt interest from municipal bonds, the head of the Tax Foundation said Tuesday that the budgetary cost of munis is relatively small.

The Internal Revenue Service is auditing $20 million of Series A bonds issued in December 2005 by the City School District of Middletown in Orange County, N.Y. The audit was disclosed Monday in an event notice the issuer filed with the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board’s online EMMA system.