"I'm not sure how it couldn't come up at this point," said an aide to the senate agriculture committee.

The committee has scheduled hearings next month, hoping to end a huge regulatory turf war. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) set out last spring to overhaul US regulation of the $37 trillion over-the-counter derivatives markets, and its proposals ran into heavy opposition from the treasury department and the Federal Reserve.

The CFTC suffered another assault on its reputation on Wednesday after a newspaper reported it kept under wraps a report on the troubled hedge fund months before the New York Federal Reserve Bank organised a privately funded $3.6 billion bailout.

CFTC chairwoman Brooksley Born defended her agency,maintaining that the financial report in question was outdated, was probably available to other regulators and gave no indication of the Greenwich hedge fund's later woes.

But Julie Williams, the acting comptroller of the currency, treasury's top banking regulator, said that bank supervisors, unlike the CFTC, do not have access to these financial reports.

"The type of information that is at issue here is not something that we would ordinarily see," Williams said. Federal Reserve officials could not immediately respond to questions on the matter.

Senate agriculture committee chairman Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, will probably bring up the issue at a December 16 hearing.

Hedge funds -- private investment funds for sophisticated investors -- often invest millions of dollars in derivatives, largely-unregulated financial products.

Federal Reserve board chairman Alan Greenspan, treasury secretary Robert Rubin and others openly criticised the CFTC for its derivatives regulation plan.Historically the nation's top financial regulators have cooperated on such issues.

In its so-called "concept release" the CFTC wondered whether new rules were needed to govern the growing off-exchange derivatives markets.

House Banking committee chairman James Leach, an Iowa Republican, is concerned the CFTC may not be cooperating with other financial regulators, an aide said.

"Leach's views are if one regulator has information which would raise questions to other regulators then it ought to be shared," a banking committee aide said.

The agency had secured Long-Term Capital's audited 1997 annual financial report in March this year, one of 1,200 such reports from hedge funds that it receives. It conceded that it did not share that information with other financial regulators.

"It wasn't a warning bell to us," Born said. "We believe in information sharing, but there needs to be an indication of a need for sharing. We did not have that indication when we received these statements," she said in aninterview.

"By the time (Long-Term Capital) was in trouble in September, its financial situation had changed substantially from its year-end 1997 financial situation," she added.

The outdated and scant information the CFTC had, Born said, is a call for more hedge fund oversight because crucial information about the fund's over-the-counter derivatives investments was not disclosed.

"We were roundly criticised for even raising these issue by other financial regulators and by the OTC derivatives dealers," she said.

Top US financial regulators meet frequently to discuss joint concerns in the financial markets, a forum that was established after the 1987 market crash.