The United States on Friday said that the financial transaction hindering six-party nuclear negotiations would be resolved soon, and reaffirmed its will to facilitate the process.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a daily briefing that the U.S. government is seeing to it that the issue will be resolved.

The U.S. chief nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill left Beijing for Washington after the negotiations were forced into recess Thursday. North Korea, whose participation was key to the nuclear talks, boycotted negotiations when the promised transfer of funds from a Macao bank was delayed.

Banco Delta Asia (BDA) had frozen some 25 million dollars in funds linked to North Korea after the U.S. Treasury in September 2005 accused the bank of laundering money for Pyongyang.

After an 18-month investigation, an agreement between Washington and Pyongyang was announced earlier in the week under which BDA would release the money and transmit it to a North Korean account at the Bank of China.

But the transfer has yet to be made due to technical problems.

The delay led to a suspension of negotiations among six countries -- South and North Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan -- who on Monday began talks in Beijing to implement a North Korean denuclearization deal. But Pyongyang insisted that it needed to have the money in hand before it would engage in the negotiations.

McCormack repeated that the problem was purely technical.