The paper examines the relationship between audit fee cutting on the initial engagement and the auditor's independence. Several researches support the notion that when there are disputes over the accounting issues between auditors and their clients, auditors with first engagement fee cutting will compromise their independence to earn the future quasi-rents. By using 143 public sample firms with financial distress and initial engagement over the 2002-2006 period, the results indicate that accounting firms with fee cutting are less likely to issue going concern opinions to clients than to those without fee-cuttings. However, this phenomena only applies to the Non-big 4 firms. For the Big 4 firms, there was no significant difference on the opinion between the fee cutting and the non-fee-cutting groups. Overall, this result also supports the Big 4 have the higher independence than the Non-Big 4 due to the reputation effect.