Abstract:
The indispensability of the role of education in the incessant calls for attempts at addressing the
Audit Expectation Gap (AEG) problem in extant literature seems unquestionable. Interestingly
however, these calls for responding to the AEG problem through education appear to have been
skewed towards one mode. Educating users with the view to reconciling their views on financial
statement audits to the views of the accounting profession regarding the work and role of
auditors seems dominant. However, notwithstanding the litany of evidence of prior attempts to
address AEG problem through this mode of education, the problem seems to be persisting, and
in some cases and contexts, appears to be escalating. Thus exploring different approaches
regarding the nature and type of education to adopt could be interesting. This conceptual paper
attempts to address this fundamental question by proposing a circumscribed mode of education;
educating users on the principal areas of expectations that financial statements audits are
incapable of achieving. A type of education aimed at explicating the areas of illegitimate and
unreasonable expectations on the part of users of financial statements is proposed. This, it is
posited, could contribute to fundamentally curtailing the range of unreasonable expectations on
the part of stakeholders.
