Diferenças de expectativas em auditoria no Brasil

Abstract

This paper examined the situation of audit expectations gaps after the review of international standards, which culminated in the application of the updated format of the Auditors’ Report in Brazil, in 2017. Questionnaires applied resulted in 185 valid responses for analysis. The level of requirement of accounting users in relation to the duties of auditors, captured by the Expectation Index (EI) proxy, was calculated based on the methodology developed by Porter (1993) and adapted by Litjens, Buuren & Vergoossen (2015), encompassing: i) reasonableness gap, (ii) auditor performance gap and(iii) standards gap. The Mann-Whitney test revealed the perpetuation of empirical evidence about the differences in expectations documented in recent decades. Thus, it was shown that, even analyzing the perception of auditors and users after changing the standard, which brought significant improvements to the report, expectation gaps can still be detected. Additional tests indicated that no significant differences were found in the expectations index between genders and different levels of use of the audit report.