Who signed off on that answer?

A security questionnaire is a set of contractual representations. Six months later, the only question that matters is who stands behind each row.

What you actually signed

A completed questionnaire is usually incorporated by reference into the agreement it supports. The rows are representations. If one turns out to be materially wrong after an incident, the conversation is contractual, not technical.

This is well understood in the abstract and almost never reflected in how the forms get filled: at speed, by whoever had capacity, with no record of who decided what.

The question nobody can answer later

Six months after submission, ask of any given row: who decided this was true, when, and on the basis of which document? In most organisations that information does not exist anywhere. The form was filled, sent, and filed.

That gap is the real exposure. Not that an answer was wrong — answers drift, that is expected — but that no one can reconstruct the basis on which it was given, which turns an explainable error into an indefensible one.

Sign-off as a record, not a ceremony

The fix is unglamorous: for every answer that was flagged, uncertain, or drafted from a gap, record who approved it, when, and against what text. Not the whole form — that becomes theatre nobody completes. Just the rows that carried judgement.

The record has to bind to the answer text, not to the row number. An approval attached to row 47 says nothing if the wording of row 47 changed afterwards. This is why our sign-off log stores a hash of the exact text that was approved: it makes “this was signed” mean “this wording was signed”.

Why we block the export

Our pipeline refuses to produce a finished form while any flagged answer is unsigned. That is a deliberate piece of friction, and it is the feature we would cut last.

The reasoning is about where liability sits. A tool that silently completes a form has quietly assumed responsibility for claims it cannot stand behind. A tool that stops and requires a named human to approve the uncertain rows makes the transfer explicit and auditable — which is the honest arrangement, and also the one that survives contact with a customer's lawyer.