Relying on the insights gained from the interviews, we developed four items to measure the dependent variable, independence commitment and three items for the independent variable, client commitment, each item using a five point Likert scale (ranging from 1 = ‘‘strongly disagree’’ to 5 = ‘‘strongly agree’’). The questions (as shown in Appendix I) were pretested with three practitioners, three directors of provincial institutes, and three accounting academics. As a result of the comments provided, minor revisions were made to some questions for the main survey. The items resulted in a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.75 for independence commitment and 0.78 for client commitment, indicating a high degree of reliability of the measures. For each of the two constructs, the composite scale was formed by adding up the scores of the items involved.