Global finance officials voiced their support on Saturday for the International Monetary Fund (IMF)'s efforts to strengthen surveillance over global financial stability.

"The Committee welcomes the steps being taken to strengthen and modernize IMF surveillance to ensure its effectiveness as globalization deepens," said a communique released by the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), the policy steering committee of the IMF.

The IMF should improve the quality of surveillance, its focus, candor, and evenhandedness, said the communique, noting it is important to "enhance the focus of surveillance on key risks facing members and on cross-country spillovers."

Gordon Brown, Britain's finance minister and head of the IMFC, said both the quality and the candor of the surveillance process need to be improved to preserve global economic stability.

The revision should be carried out in a way that adds no new obligations to IMF member countries and takes an evenhanded approach based on dialogue and persuasion, said Brown at the spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank.

Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson also urged the IMF to make fundamentally reform to strengthen surveillance over exchange rates.

"Exercising firm surveillance over members' exchange rate policies is the core function of the institution," said Paulson, a move speculated by some U.S. media to press China to speed up financial reform.

"Reform of the IMF's foreign exchange surveillance is the lynchpin on which other reforms depend, and we look forward to action in this important area very soon after these meetings," said Paulson. "The IMF staff must do a better job in addressing foreign exchange surveillance on a day-to-day basis."

Ministers from both the developed and the developing countries also voiced their support for the IMF's reforms in currency surveillance.

Argentina's Finance Minister Felisa Miceli, speaking on behalf of some South American countries, said that if surveillance rather than lending will turn out to be the most prominent role of the fund, then its governance structure should extend more to the logic of its regulatory role and less to that than a club of creditors.

"We fully support the efforts to clarify and update the surveillance framework," said Finland's Finance Minister Eero Heinaluoma, speaking on behalf of some European countries. "The process must stay within the surveillance mandate in the Article of Agreement."

Hu Xiaolian, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China, also welcomed the IMF's efforts to strengthen surveillance in safeguarding global financial stability and promoting the economic prosperity of its members.

"We have noted the efforts to strengthen Fund surveillance since the Singapore Meetings, including through possible revision of the 1977 Decision on Surveillance over Exchange Rate Policies," she said.

"In this regard, we wish to emphasize that, first, revision of the Decision should not proceed too hastily," she said. "In making adequate and careful analysis, the Fund must take the opinions of all concerned parties into account and build broad consensus among all member countries to ensure that it would benefit them all."

Second, in strengthening surveillance, the Fund should be realistic, and not overestimate, the role of exchange rate, said Hu, who attended the meetings on behalf of Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of China's central bank.

"Biased advice would damage the Fund's role in safeguarding global economic and financial stability," she said, while emphasizing that the focus of surveillance should be consistent with the purposes laid out in the Fund's Articles of Agreement.

"Due respect should be paid to the fundamental role of sustaining growth in promoting external stability. External stability can only contribute to overall sustained stability when anchored by domestic stability," she concluded.