文档介绍：外文文献翻译
原文:
Auditors' and Investors' Perceptions of the "Expectation Gap"
INTRODUCTION
In the United States,the auditing "expectation gap" refers to the difference between (1) what the public and financial statement users believe the responsibilities of auditors to be and (2) what auditors believe their responsibilities are (AICPA 1993, iii). This expectation gap notion is not new, and might have originated in the well publicized public hearings conducted to determine how the massive McKesson & Robbins fraud, exposed in 1937, could exist over several years.
Additional investigations of the accounting profession and the role of public accountants in performing audits occurred in the sixty-plus years since the McKesson & Robbins scandal. Some of the more publicized inquiries involved Senator Lee Metcalf (1970s), Representative John Moss (1970s), Representative John Dingell (1980s and 1990s), and the . General Accounting Office (GAO) (1990s).
In 1988, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountant's (AICPA) Committee, the Auditing Standards Board (ASB), sought to reduce the expectation gap with a series of Statements on Auditing Standards (SASs), SAS No. 53 through SAS No. 61, collectively referred to as the "expectation gap" SASs. One attempt to assess the efficacy of this SASs was a 1993 AJCPA-sponsored conference (AICPA 1993) that reviewed both the progress of the expectation gap SASs and future issues confronting the ASB. The Conference concluded that further research on the expectation gap SASs was "sorely needed" (AICPA 1993, iv). In the area of fraud detection, both the AICPA (1996, 7) and the GAO (1996, 75) concluded that the expectation gap still exists; however, they did not offer any empirical evidence to that effect.
Given this background, this study surveys public accountants and individual investors to obtain their perceptions of the extent to which an expectation gap exists in several dimensions of the attest function. This study extends