The Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) has formally handed over its eighth report, which is believed to state that the IRA is still engaged in intelligence-gathering, to the Irish and British governments this evening.
The body confirmed it had given the report to the governments and the Minister for Justice Michael McDowell said the report had been received.
Sinn Féin MP Conor Murphy
"Arrangements are being made for consideration of the report by the Government as a preliminary to laying it before the Houses of the Oireachtas and publication," Mr McDowell said in a statement.
Ahead of its publication Sinn Féin has condemned the group saying it was "little more than a tool of British securocrats hostile to the development of the peace process".
The IMC report will also point to continuing IRA criminality but leave open whether such activity is authorised by IRA leaders or whether it is due to IRA members operating autonomously or semi-autonomously, sources said.
The report will be generally positive about the IRA, however, and will acknowledge that it is broadly living up to its commitments of July 28th last year to cease activity and end its armed campaign.
The British and Irish governments are privately conceding that it will not be the catalyst to persuade the DUP's Rev Ian Paisley to begin opening contacts with Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams.
There will be little surprise at the IMC determination that IRA criminality remains a problem, but its finding that the IRA is still gathering intelligence will cause unease.
It will almost certainly ensure that when the DUP holds its annual conference in Belfast on Saturday, the mood will be to reject any pressure to engage with Sinn Féin in power-sharing talks.
The IMC takes its information from a variety of sources, including the PSNI, Garda and MI5.
Sinn Féin MP for Newry & Armagh, Conor Murphy said: "It compiles reports based totally on information supplied by the political detectives, the same people who engineered the collapse of the political institutions in 2002. He said the IMC was operating "entirely outside the terms of the Good Friday Agreement".
"Given the make-up of the IMC their reports and recommendations are politically loaded, discriminatory, and they subvert the democratic rights of the electorate who voted for the Agreement."
But a senior source told The Irish Times: "There is evidence of intelligence-gathering and the feeling is that this could not happen without the knowledge of the IRA leadership."
The report, which further deals with the level of loyalist paramilitary activity and criminality, as well as the behaviour of republican dissident groups, will also make reference to people exiled by the IRA and other paramilitaries.
The IMC's conclusions will also pose some awkward questions for the North's Security Minister, Shaun Woodward, who in December told The Irish Timeshe had "no reason to believe that the IRA is involved in any criminality at all".
Dublin and London are now looking more to the next IMC publication in April for increasingly positive findings that would put pressure on Dr Paisley to do business with Mr Adams.