Audit Expectation Gap

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Introduction “The auditing expectation gap refers to the difference between what the public and other financial statement users perceive auditors responsibilities to be and what auditors believe their responsibilities entail”. The audit expectation gap is very important to the auditing profession due to the reason that the higher the unfulfilled expectations from the public it means that the credibility will be lower. An audit expectation gap exists due to the complicated nature of an audit function, conflicting role of auditors and time lag in responding to changing expectation. The audit expectation gap has a very long and persistent history. There is a large concern with the current existence of the “expectation gap” between the auditing…show more content…
questionnaires. There was attempts to establish whether there are any differences in the observations concerning auditor’s detection and disclosure duties between the auditors themselves and the users of accounting reports. Both auditors and the users of accounting reports have extremely different beliefs on how much responsibility the auditor’s hold for detecting and disclosing irregularities and illegal activity. Most users held the auditor’s to have more responsibility and were responsible for detecting and disclosing irregularities and any illegal acts that were occurring than the auditors believed themselves to…show more content…
A review of the evolution of the audit objectives from 1840 to 1940 suggested that statement verification was the primary concern of auditors in relation to the public organisations in the period 1830 to 1860. After this more emphasis was placed on fraud detection in the late nineteenth century. In the early part of this century the main audit objective returned to statement verification. The study showed that audit objectives and practices tend to follow external events and that the profession has come across great difficulty in reconciling public expectations with the practicalities of auditing. It also suggested that any general confusion over the role of auditors has existed to an extent that it has proven to be too difficult even for the profession to come to an agreement on what the main purpose of company auditing and the message to be sent to the investing public is. Developing fraud detection skills Any fraud examiner relies on the following

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