EDUCATING USERS ON THE LIMITATIONS OF FINANCIAL STATEMENT AUDITS: A PROPOSAL FOR BRIDGING THE AUDIT EXPECTATION GAP

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.