Abstract This article examines the existence of expectations gap and going-concern uncertainties in the operations of the United States Auditing Standards Board. In this paper we present the results of research which elicited perceptions of the auditor's role in the presence of going-concern uncertainties and perceptions about the going-concern opinion from auditors and bank lending officers. As expected, the response concerning the auditors' role picked most often by the auditors (42 percent) reflected current auditing standards suggesting that the auditor's role is to assess the recoverability of assets. Also as expected, the response picked most often by the bankers (49 percent) reflects their desire for an early-warning signal from the auditor. The most surprising result was that a large number of auditors (39 percent) also thought it was the auditor's duty to provide financial statement users with a warning signal. When the removal of the subject-to opinion option was first proposed in 1977 the expectations gap appeared to be very large. The profession has slowly moved in the direction of meeting the public's expectations in this area and if the revision of Statement on Auditing Standards No. 34 becomes reality the gap will be closed.
Campbell et al. (Tue,) studied this question.