O assistente técnico contador em perícias sobre matéria patrimonial: percepção de um grupo de advogados

Abstract

There are usually three accountants involved in accounting expert inspections in the court: one court expert, that is appointed by the judge, and two appointed accountant experts, that are appointed by the plaintiff or defendant; however, when the accounting literature addresses the experts, it approaches the profile and the work regarding the court expert and it omits appointed experts even they being the majority in number of professionals involved. Also regarding extrajudicial expert inspections, mainly, in arbitration procedures, the literature is scarce and mentions little about the role of the appointed expert. In this context, the present work tries to understand the following question: What is the perception of a group of lawyers about the profile and the acting of an expert accountant appointed by the plaintiff or defendant? This question is aimed at identifying and describing how this group of lawyers, one of the main users of experts appointed by the plaintiff or defendant services, sees the accountants as appointed expert, before, during and after the execution of the expert inspection. It is also aimed at identifying the characteristics that accountants need to have to act well in this area. To meet this objective, an exploratory and descriptive research was carried out using semi structured interviews with a group of four lawyers. The interviews indicated that the lawyers understand that the accounting experts appointed by the the plaintiff or defendant have an essential role in carrying out technical accounting issues in legal or arbitration processes. They recognize them as partners that work before, during and after the actual expert inspection phase, as well as that the accountants, when performing this function, need to have deep knowledge of the technical issue in discussion and, among other characteristics, need to have extremely developed oral and written communication skills, because in accounting issues they are usually the communication channel of the party with the other procedural players, mainly judges, arbitrators, court experts and experts appointed by the opposing party.