Abstract: To strengthen the internal governance of accounting firms and improve the practice quality of accounting firms is of vital importance in strengthening the clean-up effect of the capital market environment and strengthening the role of the certified public accountants in supervising the listed companies. From the perspective of the internal governance of audit firms, this paper takes the partners of accounting firms and the listed companies audited by them from 2014 to 2019 as the samples to investigate the impact of client resource gap between the partners of accounting firms on audit quality. The results show that the audit independence of the partners would not be eroded by more or less of the numbers of the client resources of the partners of accounting firms, on the contrary, the audit quality will be improved. When the client resources among the partners are unequal, the audit quality will be harmed. Meanwhile, the fairness perception and the relative sense of unevenness would weaken the positive impact of the numbers of client resources of the partners on audit quality. The results of the extensibility analysis show that the big audit firms with perfect internal governance mechanism and the external supervision effect of analysts can relieve the negative impact of unequal client resources between the partners on audit quality, but the heavy pressure of business expansion on the big firms will also weaken the positive correlation between the numbers of client resources of the partners and the audit quality.

Key words: audit partners, client resource gap, audit quality, internal governance of audit firms