Browsing by Author "Mahoro Nicole"

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    Auditor-Client Relationship, Professional Skepticism and Audit Quality Among Medium Enterprises in Kampala.
    (Makerere University Business School, 2025-01-08) Mahoro Nicole
    Audit quality is critical in ensuring the reliability, integrity, and transparency of financial reporting, particularly for medium-sized enterprises (MEs) that are increasingly vulnerable to audit deficiencies. In Kampala, Uganda, concerns persist over compromised auditor independence, misleading financial disclosures, and weakened stakeholder trust. This study explores the influence of the auditor-client relationship and professional skepticism on audit quality. Anchored in agency theory, the study used a cross-sectional design and a quantitative approach, with primary data obtained from 298 medium enterprises through structured questionnaires. Stratified and simple random sampling was used to ensure representation across key enterprise categories. The data were interpreted using correlation analysis and multiple regression. This study established that professional skepticism itself demonstrated a strong positive association with audit quality, while the auditor–client relationship showed no significant direct correlation with audit quality. Regression analysis asserted that professional skepticism was a better predictor of audit quality than the auditor-client relationship, and together they account for 33.7% of the variation in audit quality. The study recommends that Kampala audit firms build trust centered relationships with medium enterprise clients through transparent communication and ethical practices while guarding against excessive closeness by rotating partners and reinforcing independence; simultaneously, they should institutionalize professional skepticism via ongoing training, real world case simulations, and by embedding skepticism metrics in performance reviews so that critical inquiry becomes intrinsic to every audit; moreover, firms ought to leverage strong client rapport to fuel, rather than dull, skeptical judgment by guiding auditors on balancing rapport with rigorous challenge; finally, recognizing that skepticism overwhelmingly drives quality and that other factors remain unexplained, firms should adopt a holistic quality enhancement strategy that further explores auditor experience, firm methodologies, technology use, and regulatory oversight.