why do I get a different sustainability questionnaire from each customer

Every buyer translates the same sources differently

Each customer compiles its own questionnaire because there is no mandatory format that everyone adheres to. A bank translates its information obligation into its own risk categories, a large customer subject to the CSRD (Directive (EU) 2022/2464) translates its reporting obligation into its own supply chain questions, and an insurer asks different questions based on its own acceptance policy. The underlying facts are often the same — the number of employees, the countries where the company has establishments— whether the company applies ISO 27001 — but the question wording, the order and the requested evidence differ by portal.

This difference is thus not in the facts, but in the translation. A customer taking the EFRAG VSME basic module as a starting point asks slightly differently about energy consumption than a customer using its own Excel format for years. A customer applying NIS2 asks about specific measures from Article 21(2) — think of access control or incident response — while another customer prefers to ask for an ISO 27001 certificate as proof that those measures have been tested somewhere. Recognition of the question, not of the source, is therefore the bottleneck: the same underlying information must be dressed up ten times differently.

Why the source does not impose one mandatory format

The CSRD (Directive (EU) 2022/2464) requires large enterprises to report on sustainability themselves, but does not impose a uniform questionnaire format on their suppliers — the customer determines for themselves how they collect the required supply chain data. The same applies to NIS2 (Directive (EU) 2022/2555, Article 21(2)): the ten measures are fixed, but not the questionnaire that a buyer uses to check whether their suppliers apply them. The EFRAG VSME is moreover a voluntary standard — a customer may use it as a basis, adapt it, or ignore it. This explains why the sector in which the enterprise operates in one list there is a dropdown and in another a free text question: the source regulates the content, not the form.