Audit quality has been a major debate within the financial reporting and auditing fraternity for decades as a result of major scandals. The current study seeks to propose improvements to the key engagement performance quality control (QC) measures in the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) of Uganda regarding preengagement discussions, resource deployment, supervision, review and documentation. The research objective is to establish, evaluate, and propose improvements to the key engagement performance QC measures used by the OAG and private audit firms in undertaking both in-house and outsourced public universities’ audits. The study adopts a qualitative research strategy; the multiple case studies being those at four public universities (as audit clients of the OAG), the OAG Uganda and five private audit firms to which government audits are regularly outsourced. The study used semi-structured open-ended interviews administered to 51 respondents while data was coded a priori and analysed using the Atlas.TI software. The study shows that the OAG faces high workload, partial or no documentation using the Teammate audit software, poor work assignment and resource deployment style, undefined audit supervision and review responsibilities leading to an overlap of roles by senior managers, poor QC for outsourced audits, client audit stress from analogous audit activities by accountability institutions and poor attitude of staff and management towards quality management. The recommendations from this study will not only benefit government sector auditing in Uganda, but also in other countries and are therefore of universal value.

Keywords : Audit Quality, Government Sector Auditing, Outsourced Audits, Supervision, Review, Documentation, Deployment, Pre-Engagement Discussions.