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In light of the multilateral effort to ensure the adequacy of the financial resources available to the International Monetary Fund, and with a view to supporting the Fund's ability to provide timely and effective balance of payments assistance to its members, the Central Bank of Malta agrees to lend to the Fund an SDR denominated amount up to the equivalent of EUR120 million, on the terms and conditions set in this policy paper.

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This paper reviews the Fund's liquidity position. The review covers the Fund's financial activities for the period September 11, 2009 through March 31, 2010, and also discusses recent developments likely to influence the Fund's liquidity position. Against this backdrop, it examines the outlook for liquidity using the one-year Forward Commitment Capacity (FCC), the primary measure of the Fund's liquidity, which is calculated taking into account supplementary resources made available under borrowing arrangements, including note purchase agreements.

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This is the companion background paper to the staff report on Financial Soundness Indicators (FSIs): Experience with the Coordinated Compilation Exercise and Next Steps. It provides detailed information on the modalities of the Coordinated Compilation Exercise (CCE), the experience with the CCE, the issues that arose in that exercise regarding the compilation methodology in the Financial Soundness Indicators: Compilation Guide (Guide), and the matters that were taken into account in considering the specific amendments to the Guide, presented in the staff report.

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This paper reviews progress under the IMF's strengthened cooperative strategy on overdue financial obligations. Total arrears to the Fund declined by SDR 11 million, to SDR 1,327 million, since the last review. While Sudan's payments in excess of its new obligations falling due to the Fund accounted for the decline, arrears by Somalia and Zimbabwe increased further. The majority of the arrears to the Fund (85 percent) were to the General Resources Account (GRA).

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Executive Summary In the discussion on the experience with staff-monitored programs (SMPs) at the time of the 2002 biennial surveillance review, a number of Directors expressed concerns about certain aspects of signaling SMPs and requested a follow-up discussion on these SMPs. Several Directors felt that this discussion should also cover signaling through "comfort letters." In response to this request, the paper lays out the main concerns about current policies on signaling SMPs and ad hoc signaling through "comfort letters" and proposes modifications to these policies that could address these concerns. SMPs emerged as a vehicle for two very different purposes: general signaling to private and/or public creditors and donors, and building a policy track record toward a Fund-supported program. The experience with SMPs suggests that the present framework does not suit both purposes equally well. The close formal resemblance to Fund-supported programs carries the risk that signaling SMPs may be misconstrued as entailing Fund endorsement and well-defined quality standards for the policies pursued; in addition, relatively lax standards for reporting on performance under these SMPs often allow policy slippages to go unnoticed. These risks are less serious in the case of track-record SMPs, where the purpose-building a track record toward a Fund arrangement-establishes a clear distinction from Fund supported programs as well as a simple yardstick for judging success or failure. To remedy these weaknesses in current policies, it is proposed to limit the existing SMP framework to track-record SMPs and to introduce a modified framework for cases where monitoring is requested to provide the staff's assessment of members' policies to private and/or official creditors or donors. This framework-the enhanced monitoring procedure (EMP)-would essentially be an off-shoot of Article IV surveillance with periodic interim assessments, and would shift the focus of attention from the mere existence of a monitoring arrangement to the provision on an assessment of members' policies. The EMP would eschew formal features of Fund-supported programs and would not be used to signal an endorsement of members' policies similar to that conveyed by a Fund arrangement. The EMP would have clear standards for the staff's assessments of the adequacy of the authorities' policies relative to the identified macroeconomic and related structural problems, as well as well-defined rules for the communication of these assessments, including their circulation to the Board for information. Concerns about signaling through "comfort letters" relate primarily to the lack of clear standards for content, interdepartmental review, and circulation to the Board of such statements. The resulting variations in practices raise questions about uniformity of treatment. To ensure a reasonable degree of uniformity, it is proposed to establish guidelines that would require "comfort letters" and similar staff statements (i) to contain a clear overall assessment of the adequacy of macroeconomic and related structural policies while avoiding endorsements of the lending operation for which the letter or statement is being sought; (ii) to be subjected to defined interdepartmental review procedures and management approval; and (iii) to be circulated to the Board for information.

Fund accounting.