why am I receiving questions that are not relevant to my business

One format for all customers in the supply chain

This is almost always due to the source of the questionnaire, not a miscalculation of your company. Most customers purchase their questionnaire from a single supplier, or base it on a single standard, and then deploy it across the entire chain — from the sole proprietor to the multinational. The VSME of EFRAG is a good example of this: that basic module was built for non-listed SMEs in general, with the CSRD (Directive 2022/2464) as the background, which the larger customer must report themselves and which calls for data from the entire chain, including small suppliers for whom parts of that questionnaire do not apply.

You see the same pattern with NIS2 and ISO 27001. A customer that falls under Directive 2022/2555 must check with its suppliers whether the ten measures of Article 21 paragraph 2 are secured — even if your company itself does not fall under that directive and those questions are therefore strictly speaking not mandatory for you. Something similar applies to questions that are taken literally from Annex A of ISO/IEC 27001: a procurement department often adopts the entire appendix, including measures that are not relevant to your company size or service. This is not an error on the customer's part, it is a trade-off between precision and manageability: one list for everyone is easier for the customer to maintain than a hundred variants.

Why that format is set up so broadly

The underlying regulations — the CSRD, NIS2, the VSME and ISO 27001 — are themselves written for a broad group of enterprises and organisations, not tailored to a single small company. If a question really does not apply, this can usually be resolved with a brief explanation; the answer file preserves that explanation as well as a positive answer, together with basic data such as the sector in which the enterprise operates and the number of employees, which often explain precisely why a question is or is not relevant.