Congress is scheduled to return Thursday, with one of its top priorities a deal to avert the December 31 “fiscal cliff” deadline of looming tax increases and automatic spending cuts, but it will need to work quickly or reach some type of interim agreement.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued an Investor Bulletin to help purchasers of municipal bonds better assess the bonds’ credit risks.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has ordered five firms to pay $4.48 million for unfairly using bond proceeds to pay reimburse themselves for membership fees they paid to the California Public Securities Association, a lobbying group.

The Investment Company Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce today filed a notice of appeal of a recent ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia upholding the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s rule requiring mutual funds with commodities investments to register with the agency.

Trades were placed one to two days after the orders arrived by fax or mail, causing some customers to get inferior prices from late 2003 until June 2011, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said in a statement.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has ordered Pruco Securities, a securities broker-dealer owned by Prudential Financial, to pay more than $10.7 million to customers who placed mutual fund orders via facsimile or mail and received an inferior price for their shares.

So what are three elements that are going to shape the mutual fund landscape in 2013?

The Securities and Exchange Commission last week barred an Arizona-based mutual fund manager from the securities industry for failing to follow his own prospectus, which led to his fund’s collapse.

After the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and continued calls for tighter scrutiny of the financial sector, 2012 brought a flurry of congressional hearings, public comments on rule proposals, and lobbying and public posturing by various stakeholders. Scores of new rules and regulations that could affect the advisory industry made their way through varying stages of development. But for all the noise this year, what actually changed?

President Obama, facing a budget stalemate with Republicans, urged leaders of both parties to assemble an interim bill to keep taxes from rising on middle- income Americans as they work on a more comprehensive plan.

Robert Khuzami, who led the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division’s pursuit of financial industry wrongdoing related to the subprime crisis, plans to step down as early as next month, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

President Obama is urging lawmakers to put together a package to avoid the fiscal cliff with the next 10 days.

Another former aide to Mary Schapiro takes up a new leadership role at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass," Boehner said in a statement after Republicans broke from a conference where leaders made a last-minute appeal for votes.

Ahead of two votes in the House of Representatives on Republican-backed spending and tax bills, Senate Democrats ripped into House Speaker John Boehner's so-called "Plan B," calling the proposals to avoid going over the fiscal cliff a "nonstarter" in the upper chamber and deepening the partisan impasse ahead of a year-end deadline to avert a series of automatic tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts.

The Clearing House spent 10 months and $2 million to plan a simulation of a large bank failure — and the results are not only fascinating, they're exemplary.

SEC Chairman Elisse Walter may hire as her top lawyer a former enforcement director from the main U.S. derivatives regulator.

Speaker of the House John Boehner said Tuesday that House Republicans would introduce a bill to raise tax rates for millionaires as a “Plan B” in case his negotiations with President Obama on averting the fiscal cliff fail to produce an agreement.

President Obama lowered his tax revenue demand by $200 billion and offered to start tax rate increases at $400,000 in income instead of $250,000, moving closer to a budget deal with House Speaker John Boehner.

The Financial Services Institute is calling on the leaders of a Senate committee to pass a resolution expressing the "sense of the Congress" that the current tax system includes valuable incentives that encourage Americans to save for retirement and should be preserved.