The Association was founded to provide education, professional credentials and certification, due diligence standards and professional forums as the first association to recognize the evolution of due diligence as a separate field, discipline and industry.

The history of the Association dates back to 1984. The earliest concepts were driven by the need for an independent organization to proactively educate and assist people and organizations to understand and make better decisions with lower risk, by using an early version of the discipline originally termed 'management due diligence'. A new paradigm evolved from insights garnered from:

• Several thousand real-world projects in risk analysis, fraud prevention, technology development, and corporate and financial engineering, and
• Formal research and development begun in 1993, with the development and refinement of the first scientific due diligence systems and the first due diligence standards by 2002.

This combination of real world experience, formal scientific testing, and formal technology development, is the basis of the new paradigm of modern due diligence, and the critical foundations of the Association.