Auditoria Independente: um estudo sobre os tipos de opiniões de auditoria no caso da Petrobras

Abstract

In the year 2014, an investigation was initiated that led to the discovery of fraud, gratuitous payments, over invoicing of contracts and misappropriation of public funds in Petrobras operations, which as Publicly-held Company, has its financial statements audited and publicly disclosed. Therefore, the purpose of this paper was to verify the types of auditors' opinions in the state's financial statements in the previous period and in the year in which the investigation was initiated (2011 to 2014). The intention is to verify if through their opinions, the auditors indicated indications of fraud in the activities of the company. The data for analysis were collected in the statements publicly disclosed by the company. The results indicated that the auditors expressed "Unmodified Opinion", followed by an emphasis paragraph and other matters, but there was no qualified opinion, that is, in the opinion of the auditors, the statements accurately represented the state's financial and equity position. Through this study, it can be concluded that it is not the auditor's duty to detect frauds. It is also concluded that irregularities may be hidden in the financial information of the company, for this reason a more in-depth assessment is needed on Petrobras internal controls and internal audit.