Audit's Role

Abstract

As a way to reduce informational asymmetry and ensure reliability and reliability of accounting information, auditing gained notoriety. However, there is some disagreement in the literature about their roles and responsibilities, this disagreement comes especially from the function performed and what is expected by society. Therefore, this research aims to analyze the perception of the role of external audit based on the confrontation of the concepts of accounting standards and public opinion. This research is characterized as descriptive and quanti-quali when analyzing information collected through 501,533 tweets published between 2007 and 2020 that contained the word “audit” by users whose profile language is Portuguese. The results obtained, despite not clearly identifying the phenomenon of Audit Expectation Gap, suggest that most users who tweet about the audit do so by discussing the audit in relation to public resources and aspects of a political nature. it reinforces the lack of understanding of the real functions performed by the audit. This study contributes by exploring the concept of Audit Expectation Gap in the Brazilian context, providing evidence about the expectations generated by public opinion about the auditing profession in the social media environment, where comments are generated spontaneously by users.