Abstract

The purpose of this study was twofold: to investigate clients' perceptions towards the quality of audit services offered by the big four and non-big four audit firms in Botswana and to evaluate clients' views about their satisfaction with performance of audit firms and audit teams. Data was collected from all companies regardless of their listing status including state owned enterprises. Respondents were clients' officers expected to have high level interaction with external auditors during the course of the audit. The results suggest that clients perceive audit firms as having slightly higher quality attributes than the audit teams and big four audit firms ranking higher than non-big four in executing quality audits. However, we did not find a significant difference in audit quality provided by big four audit teams and that of non-big four. In addition, the results suggest that on the overall audit clients in Botswana are highly and equally satisfied with the audit performance of both audit firms and teams. Although the clients of big four audit firms appeared to be more satisfied with performance of audit firms and teams than the clients of non-big four, no statistically significant difference was found. The study also found that only audit firm's independence and responsiveness to clients' needs, and audit team's industry expertise and interaction with audit committee were most important indicators of client satisfaction. These findings have implications to all audit firms, their clients and regulators all of whom have responsibility to improve the quality of audit services in Botswana.

Keywords:

Audit clients, audit quality attributes, audit teams, big four audit firms, client satisfaction, non-big four,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.