The Research Of Audit Expectation Gap

Audit always is conducted in a certain sociaty. Audit environment decides the function, objective of audit and auditor's duty. In the specific envionment, the pubilic and the auditor have different cognition and evaluation appraisement of audit, therefore audit expectation arises.According to development of economy, construction of orgnization has changed, form of operation has diversified, and information technology has progress with each passing day. Under the complex and fickle environment, the public require the auditor constantly increased, and rise the higher expectation. Then the auditor have improved continuously, and seek the balance between practice and environment. However, due to the audit expectation gap, the thorn, the pratice and the standard of audit have constantly adjusted, which push forward the theory and pratice's development. So it is significant to research the audit expectation gap for theory and practice.The existing literature of audit expectation gap at home and broad focus on whether the audit expectation gap exists, the cause, the measure of narrowing gap etc. But those research are restricted to the status quo, and are short of analysis by synthesis and framework of theory about the audit environment, which influnce that the analysis of cause is not deep and incomprehensive, and the measure is not feasible. Moreover, the scholars consider the audit expectation gap is a perceived gap, but there is a rare scholar to research the different cogniton of the pubilic and auditor that cause the audit expectation gap. Theremore it may not narrow the gap on the cogniton.This dissertation used normative and positive research methods to discuss the audit expectation gap. In normative research, firstly it gives a definition, then analyses the subject, object and components, and discusses the mechanism of audit expectation gap's with borrowing ideas from service quality gap, which constructs the footstone of latter reseach.On the basis of gap's definition, it used several theories to analyse the influence factors of three gaps, such as the supply and demand, institutional evolutiont, social conflict, bounded rationality, and psychology.The standard gap is affected by the institutional transduction pathway about supply and demand, standard-setting instition and procedures, bounded rationality, setting tendency and lag. The audit performance gap is affected by practice capability, the authority of selection and payment, accounting firm's size and orgnazition form, and quality control. The cognition gap is affected by self-regard, self-serving bias, social comparisons, the relation of behavior and attitudes, attribution error, the first impression's influence and conformity behavior.In order to study the situation of gap in the social change, it used the historical research method and put the audit expectation gap in chinese institutional environment. According to the changes of national stragety and economic policy, it got 5 phases, and discussed each phase's audit expectation gap. It includes foreign capital's introduction and CPA's recovery(1978-1983), development of diverse sectors of the economy and audit service's expansion (1984-1991), reform of state-owned enterprises, fraudulent practices and audit stardard initially drew up (1992-1999), corporate-governance structure and audit standard revised and converged (2000-2007), and financial crisis(after2008). Interim environment changes leads to those ghase's audit expectation gap. Each phase has it's own audit founction, model, pratice procedures, and audit market, also the measure to narrow the gap. After that, it used the logit model of panal data to do the empirical test on 2000-2005 data, to find out the relationship between the environment and audit expectaton gap.For observing the current condition of audit expectation gap in our country, it used questionnaire to find our gap. The audit expectation gaps show that auditor and stakeholder have the different conception and assessment of audit, auditor overrate their performance compared with the others, and there are performance gap, audit standard gap and unreasonable expectation.At last, it puts forward the way to narrow the gap on the three gaps. The methods includes, firstly, coodination with national strategy, basic and relevent institution, through public and bounded rational choice to achieve public will in drawing up audit standard. Secondly, it includes to improve corporate govenrnance's, enhance professional ethics and pratice capability, change accounting firm's organization form, strengthen the quality control, and severely punish those who violate the discipline. Finally, it includes to popularize the psychological knowledge, practise role play, empathize, and utilize media.Those findings will be the stuff to research the change of audit standard for pushing forward the audit in the future.