The Format Got Standardized. The Answer Never Did.

A due diligence questionnaire, in ILPA’s standardized form, opens with the firm and moves to the fund by the very next topic — numbers one and two, in a twenty-topic document. Nothing in the document marks a difference between the two. The honest answer to the firm question carries over to the next questionnaire, whichever fund is raising; the honest answer to the fund question doesn’t carry over at all — it’s specific to this fund alone.

What ILPA actually standardized

That redundancy used to be worse, in a different way. Before ILPA’s Due Diligence Questionnaire, each investor ran its own version — varying in length and in which questions it even asked — what ILPA’s own overview calls “customized due diligence questionnaires” that, despite covering similar ground, still require “an outsized level of effort to complete relative to the differences” between them. The most recent update, DDQ 2.0, published in November 2021, standardized twenty topics into one fixed order.

Twenty topics, two different kinds of fact

Standardizing the questions did not standardize what kind of fact each one is asking for. Some of the twenty topics ask about the management company itself — who sits on the investment committee, how the firm handles data security, what its ESG policy says. The true answer does not depend on which fund is raising or which investor is asking: the same firm, the same committee, the same policy, whether the questionnaire in front of it is for Fund III or Fund IV. Other topics ask about the fund itself — its terms, its strategy, its credit facility — and those genuinely should read differently every time, because the fund itself is different every time. A handful sit in between: a firm-level policy question with one sub-question that still asks for a fact specific to this fund, like a side letter's actual reporting terms. The questionnaire marks none of it.

What gets re-typed

The firm-level questions are where the repetition actually lives. A GP answers the governance question for Fund III’s largest LP in March, the identical question for a smaller LP in the same fund in April, and the same question again in July for Fund IV’s first close — three approved answers, three separate questionnaires, no connection between them. The person filling out the form in July has no way of knowing the March answer was already checked, approved, and filed; the record of it lives inside a closed questionnaire, not anywhere the next one can reach.

A few DDQ tools have started treating that as the actual problem. Orivade, for instance, lets an operator mark an approved answer as a Passport entry — a firm-level answer that holds across every fund — and the next questionnaire surfaces it as a suggestion instead of a blank field. The fix is narrow, and a stale entry is still the operator’s to catch, but it targets the exact seam DDQ 2.0 left open: not the question’s wording, but where the true answer lives.

ILPA solved the reusable question: the same twenty topics, asked the same way, by anyone using the form. What it left alone is the reusable answer — a fact about the firm that’s true every time still gets filed as if it might not be, one questionnaire at a time.