The IMF Board met in Washington on Friday where the proposal for seventh instalment loan to Bangladesh was not placed, sources said.

"The Executive Board of IMF only discussed Article IV mission report on Bangladesh, which dealt with country's latest economic situation," a finance ministry source said.

Despite various reforms in different sectors, the IMF is not satisfied with the revenue growth in the last few years.

One of the performance criteria for the IMF loan was increase of revenue by 0.5 percent against the GDP growth, but Bangladesh failed to achieve the target.

Although the IMF Board earlier gave waiver two times despite missing the revenue target, this time the board did not consider the loan, sources said.

The revised budget of the current fiscal year set a growth of 11 percent of tax revenue, which was 19 percent in the original budget. The finance ministry sources believe that even the revised target will not be achieved.

The agreement for PRGF was signed in June 2003 and so far in six instalments the IMF gave $467 million to Bangladesh under strict conditions by controlling the country's economic sovereignty.

A mission of the IMF visited Dhaka in April and submitted an evaluation report on the PRGF, which said, "All revenue targets under the PRGF-supported programme were consistently missed, and this remains one of the main reasons (along with other missed performance criteria) preventing completion of the sixth and final PRGF review."

"The major failure during the PRGF period was the inability to improve government revenue," the report read.

It said that the government revenue in FY03 was 10.3 percent of GDP while it is projected to be 10.4 percent of GDP in FY07. "While a welcome shift away from taxes on international trade underlie these numbers, no overall progress in raising total revenue has been made despite a PRGF objective to improve revenue by 1.5 percentage points," it observed.

The evaluation report, however, lauded progress in structural reforms that included strengthening central bank operations and monitoring the financial sector, privatising one of the Nationalised Commercial Banks (NCBs) and corporatising others.