what are the consequences if I don't complete the ESG questionnaire

No legal penalty, but a real commercial consequence

Not filling in anything usually does not result in a fine — the ESG questionnaire that your customer sends is generally not a legal obligation for you, but rather the way your customer completes his own CSRD reporting (Directive (EU) 2022/2464). The supply chain information that your customer needs must come from somewhere, and if you do not provide it, he must estimate or ask. That is not a fine for you, but it is a risk: in a tender or contract renewal, an empty or late list can carry more weight than a substantively meager response.

In practice, you see three routes if you do not fill in anything. The customer asks again, often with a deadline shorter than the original. Or the customer fills in an estimate himself — usually a conservative one, so unfavorable for you. Or the contract simply does not come about, without anyone explicitly saying so. Filling in a list halfway — only the fixed basic data such as the number of employees and the countries where the company has establishments — is virtually always better than nothing, because it already saves the customer from having to request that information separately.

Legal basis: CSRD obliges the customer, not the supplier

The CSRD (Directive (EU) 2022/2464) places the reporting obligation on the undertaking falling within the scope of the directive, not on its suppliers. For SMEs, there is no legal ESG reporting obligation; the EFRAG VSME standard is explicitly voluntary and designed to structure precisely this kind of supply chain questions, so that an SME supplier does not have to fill in a different format for each customer. The consequence of not filling in therefore does not run through a law that affects you, but through the contract or procurement terms of your customer — and you will only find those in the correspondence or agreement with that customer itself, not in the CSRD.