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A GROUP of the world's leading central bankers has taken the unusual step of criticising the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for failing to voice warnings forcefully enough in the run-up to the financial crisis.

The G30, an informal group of 30 central bankers and eminent economists, also claimed other failings in the IMF, including an "abysmally low" turnout of IMF officials at some key meetings.

IMF member countries were accused of failing to heed IMF warnings or exert peer pressure on recalcitrant fellow members in a new report from the G30, which called for far-reaching reforms of the IMF.

The G30 report, coinciding with the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Istanbul, said: "While the IMF's Global Financial Stability Report accurately warned about some of the key risks facing the international financial system, the Fund failed in one of its principal missions -- to convince its member governments of the risks to the world economy posed by the emerging financial crisis in the US and by other imbalances that were evident elsewhere prior to the crisis."

The G30, which is chaired by Jacob Frenkel, a former governor of the Bank of Israel and also a former senior figure in the IMF, concluded that the IMF was "not complacent, but it was not forceful enough".

Bank of England governor Mervyn King has made similar comments about the Bank of England itself, which in its own Financial Stability Report gave warnings about possible threats to the financial system in the pre-crisis period but omitted to act sufficiently robustly upon them.

The IMF's surveillance effectiveness came under particular scrutiny in the G30 report, which found that on average only nine of twenty-four IMF officials attended IMF board discussions on reports into individual countries -- what the G30 called an "abysmally low" attendance rate.

Surveillance on individual countries is regarded as a crucial means by which the IMF identifies potential threats to the world economy and acts to remedy them.

The G30 urged a string of reforms on the IMF, including a rebalancing of power within the organisation to reflect the changing global economy, reducing the size of the board and putting in place a system to allow it to issue confidential warnings to backsliding nations.

"There are challenges to the IMF's legitimacy, its authority and its effectiveness," Mr Frenkel said.

The IMF said that it welcomed suggestions on how it might reform and that there were a number of similarities between the G30 report and its own thinking.

The G30, founded in 1978, is chaired by Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the US Federal Reserve. Members include Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the European Central Bank, and Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority. The report said that it did not necessarily represent the view of all individual G30 members.

Also in Istanbul, Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, reignited debate over a possible tax on banks by arguing that a Tobin-style levy on bank trading, far from being impractical, was now more feasible.

Professor Stiglitz, a former adviser to President Clinton, said that a tax on financial transactions would be easier to implement as more of banking came under regulatory scrutiny. It would be "much more feasible today", he said.

The IMF is assessing the scope for a new tax at the request of G20 nations, although Dominique Strauss-Kahn, its managing director, has ruled out a conventional Tobin tax as impractical.

Professor Stiglitz said that a tax on the gross value of derivatives would "discourage the kind of hidden leverage that helped to cause this crisis".