Os impactos causados pela inovação tecnológica nos escritórios de contabilidade do Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

The various applications of the technology, especially, information technology - IT provides changes and breaks of paradigms by businesses and accounting professionals. This study aims to search the offices located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul that provide accounting services. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the impacts of technological changes in accounting offices of Rio Grande do Sul, since 1990. The research is exploratory and data were collected from sending a structured questionnaire (survey), divided into two parts. The first refers to the profile of the respondents and the second refers to the impacts caused by IT. To evaluate the degree of agreement, in the second part of the questionnaire, it was used the Likert scale. The sample consists of 408 accounting firms, who returned the questionnaire fully answered and the procedure used for the statistical treatment of the research’s results was the analysis of multivariate data. The statistical program used for the analysis was SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) that, through factor analysis techniques such as "R", aims to reduce the number of variables, generating factors, and cluster analysis that determines the degree of similarity between the variables. According to the survey data, it was able to see that IT has provided a number of changes in accounting offices, especially with the use of the internet, which brought more speed and security for the information. In contrast, IT caused an increase in the quantity and complexity of the tasks performed by the accounting offices, forcing them to qualify their workforce and causing a decrease in economic profitability.