Introduction In the current crisis of confidence in the public accounting profession following the Enron debacle and a series of high-profile bankruptcies of financial services firms, issues relating to the "expectations gap audit" have never been more important. While it would take a tremendous amount of effort to address these issues, I will argue that enormous amounts could be done to close the gap. In this essay I will discuss some of these issues and in particular strategies for narrowing the gap. Definitions Various definitions have been proposed for the audit expectations gap. Humphrey, Moizer, and Turley (1992), suggest that the common element in various gap definitions is that auditors behave in a way that is at odds with the beliefs and desires of others participating in or interested in the audit. The expectation gap can be broken down into two components: the reasonableness gap and the performance gap. The first case occurs when people expect more from the audit than it can offer in practical terms, for example the detection of all cases of fraud. The latter refers to the gap between what auditors can reasonably be expected to do and what they are expected to do. The “performance gap” can be further divided into two: deficient standard gap and deficient performance gap. The “deficient standards gap” refers to situations where auditors are not required by standards to report certain issues, while its counterpart refers to situations where auditors have failed to comply with existing standards. This analysis is especially important when I later examine each of the problems separately and look for their respective solutions. The Beginning Since the early 1970s, the audit profession has come under increasing pressure and scrutiny from government and users of audit reports. The term “audit expectations gap” was first coined when the AICPA convened the Cohen Commission in 1974 to investigate whether the “expectations gap” existed. However, the history of the expectations gap dates back to the beginnings of corporate auditing in the nineteenth century (Humphrey and Turley 1992). Since then, events ranging from the collapse of Arthur Anderson to ongoing savings and loan problems appear to have made the divide increasingly apparent. Strategies I agree with Power to some extent that the expectations gap is "endemic to auditing", but I believe it is possible to progressively close the gap despite the current widening gap.