The Audit Expectation Gap : Exploring the auditor’s roles and responsibilities from knowledge, performance, and evolution gap perspectives

Sammanfattning: The audit expectation gap is an interesting and widely researched phenomenon. This study seeks to explore the roles and responsibilities of auditors from the views of auditors and users of financial information. In this study, semi-structured interviews with auditors and users of financial information are conducted. The interviews were mainly analyzed from the perspectives of knowledge, performance, and evolution gaps. Different expectations of the auditor’s roles and responsibilities can lead to the auditing profession being criticized despite auditor’s performing in accordance with existing auditing standards. When the auditing profession is criticized, it leads to reduced confidence in the work that auditors perform. The confidence of society is essential to the auditing profession. If there is little or no confidence in the auditing profession, then the audit itself is of little or no value, which can have severe consequences for financial markets and the global economy. The results of this study indicate that most auditors and users of financial information do not perceive that there is a need to communicate the auditor’s roles and responsibilities to the public, or that there is only a limited need to do so. Communicating about roles and responsibilities to the client is mentioned as being the most important. However, due to the limited sample in this study, there is an opportunity to pursue additional research about auditors’ and users’ perceptions of the importance of the audit expectation gap.