Nov. 6 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Treasury Department should provide regular disclosures about losses in the $301 billion pool of Citigroup Inc. assets that the government guaranteed last year in its bid to stave off the bank’s collapse, a watchdog group said.

The Congressional Oversight Panel, in a report released today, said such guarantees “carry considerable risk to taxpayers.” It estimated that at one point the government was on the hook for $4.3 trillion for insuring or guaranteeing against losses through programs for money-market funds, financial firms’ debt and assets owned by Citigroup and Bank of America Corp.

“In light of these guarantees’ extraordinary scale and their risk to taxpayers, the panel believes these programs should be subject to extraordinary transparency,” the panel wrote.

It said the Treasury should provide taxpayers information on the composition of Citigroup’s guaranteed asset pool, its losses and projected losses.

Still, the panel acknowledged that the guarantees are likely to return a profit to taxpayers because the government charges fees for the insurance and pays only if there is a loss.

In Citigroup’s case, the New York-based bank paid the government $7.3 billion in preferred stock for the guarantees that were provided last November.

Bank of America, which was given guarantees on $118 billion of assets this year in connection with its takeover of Merrill Lynch & Co., never signed the agreement. In September, the bank agreed to pay the government $425 million to exit the program.

The report “correctly recognizes that Treasury’s guarantee program for money-market mutual funds earned more than $1.2 billion in income for taxpayers, while helping to stabilize our financial system at a time of severe stress,” Treasury spokesman Meg Reilly said in a statement. “Treasury has now successfully closed the program with no losses.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Schmidt in Washington at rschmidt5@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 6, 2009 10:30 EST