Exploring the audit capabilities expectation-performance gap of newly employed first-year trainee accountants in Gauteng: Audit managers at large firms’ perceptions

The objective of this paper is to determine the relative size of the expectation-performance gap of technical auditing and assurance knowledge of newly employed first-year trainee accountants. In a study dealing with the expectation-performance gap in accounting education it was reported that according to practitioners, graduates were not able to demonstrate the expected practical accounting knowledge. This gives rise to the question: is the gap really as big as practitioners would like academic institutions to believe? As the relative extent of the gap will be determined in this study, the findings could assist audit and assurance academics in understanding accounting practitioners’ expectations of and concerns about newly employed first-year trainee accountants, which as a result could be addressed in their education practices. In addition, training at training offices at audit firms could be customised to focus on the areas in which the newly employed first-year trainee accountants are lacking. A questionnaire was used to determine audit managers’ perceptions regarding their expectations and their perceptions regarding the actual levels of capability demonstrated by newly employed first-year trainee accountants when performing technical audit and assurance tasks, after which the relative size of the expectation-performance gap was determined. The findings indicate that audit managers do not expect newly employed first-year trainee accountants to be capable of performing any of the identified technical audit and assurance tasks without, or with only limited supervision. However, despite this rather low expectation, it was evident that newly employed first-year trainee accountants do not meet audit managers’ expectations. The technical audit and assurance task with the largest expectation-performance gap was the ability of newly employed first-year trainee accountants to consider and document the need to use computer-assisted audit techniques to gather audit evidence, with an expectation-performance gap of 28.9%.