Law and regulations regulate the auditors’ independence. An auditor should not only be independent in general, but independence in fact and independence in appearance. However, the regulations do not specifically describe how to act independence. It is the concerns of the auditor were he puts his limit for the independence. The main purpose of this study was to explain the Swedish auditors’ independence regarding gifts and relations with the auditor’s client.

We used an online questionnaire in our survey. A sample of 526 auditors was chosen to represent the Swedish auditors. We wanted to observe how different groups of auditor concern about gifts and relations with the clients, why we classified the auditors in six different dependent variables such as gender, education, experience, firm size, fee size and province.

The results showed that fee size affects the auditors’ tendency to accept gifts and have a relationship with the clients. Auditor tends to accept more gifts and have a closer relationship with clients who generate smaller fee. The study also showed that firm size affects the auditor’s tendency to have relationship with their clients. The big four are better inclined to have closer relationship with their clients than smaller firms.