Auditoria e sociedade: o diálogo necessário

Abstract

Society, which is mostly structured from a market economy perspective, demands for an audit with increasing interventions in the diagnosis of particular situations, such as: going-concern matters, reporting fraud and illegal acts, valuing organizational economy, efficiency and effectiveness. Thus, the audit product, its nature and functions need to be clarified urgently so as to be able to give an adequate response to public expectations. Actually, the range of auditing should be expanded in order to satisfy these demands, since it is expected to provides some degree of assurance, as well as a response to society's current problems. The ambiguous concept of auditing leads to confrontations between auditors and financial information users, resulting in frequent accusations that the former do not alert about organizational flaws, although they approve the financial statements.The dialogue between society and auditing needs to be reinforced, so as to reach a balance point between both.