A AUDITORIA E OS SISTEMAS DE CONTROLES INTERNOS NO BRASIL: ANTECEDENTES E EVOLUÇÃO.

The Independent or External Auditing is the branch of Accounting which copes with the examination of financial accounts to check their accuracy. The final objective is the issuing of an Auditor's Report, which is a written attestation as to the fairness of presentation of financial statements in conformity with the regulatory and legal framework the company is inserted in. The auditor's opinion is mainly destined to the external stakeholders, who base their investment decision process in the document. In its turn, the internal auditing is focused in an entity's internal environment and the resulting report issues opinion about the conformity with internal regulations and procedures as well as external regulations and legal framework. It is of paramount importance that the auditor exercises its best judgment in the execution of a thorough examination of the internal controls of the subject company. On the other hand, the internal controls are a body of rules designed to protect an entity's estate. It is known that the assessment procedures of the internal controls has undergone extraordinary changes, experiencing a broader extensiveness in view of the perception of new risks and general complexity of the markets, in all areas, stemming from the massive use of automation, which makes new demands of professionalism for controls assessment on the part of the auditors. This paper intends to review the development of the assessment procedures of an organization's internal controls. In the final part the paper suggests a information so as to give support to the assessment of the quality of an entity's internal controls and tries to detect the new demands to Auditing, which has been introduced by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]