By promoting the “Bidding for the Bidding Qualifications” programs, the establishment of an official list of qualified accounting firms and other approaches, the State-owned Asset Administration Bureaus at all levels imposes an implicit entry regulation on the audit market for SOEs. Based on the 2007—2015 data of State-owned listed companies and those accounting firms with the licenses to audit listed companies, it is discovered that the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) is not in a position to make full use of information during the entry regulation process, and those accounting firms granted the qualifications to audit SOEs by SASAC cannot provide higher audit quality (proxied by the absolute value of discretional accruals and Modified Audit Opinions) than those accounting firms without such qualifications. However, those accounting firms with a brand name reputation deliver higher audit quality than those firms without such a reputation within the same period. This conclusion still holds after the potential endogeneity problem is addressed by means of Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method. The findings indicate that auditors’ reputation is more reliable in signaling audit quality than the government-granted qualifications and that the entry regulation imposed by SASAC hasn’t achieved its expected objectives.