Bonds v. McDonough

35 Vet. App. 445 (2022), argued May 25, 2022, decided October 5, 2022. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, No. 20-4899, per curiam before Judges Allen, Meredith and Toth, with Judge Toth concurring. Precedential. Board decision vacated and remanded.

If VA read one filing of yours as a single claim and your argument is that the same document asked for something else as well, this is the case. Read the dating caveat below before you rely on it, because it is the part people drop.

What it holds

VA must determine how many claims a document raised before it decides how far any one of them reaches. The holding is one sentence:

"[W]e hold only that VA must determine the total number and type of claims raised in a claim-stating document and referenced evidence before addressing the scope of each individually raised claim."

And the step that gets skipped:

"[E]ven if a claim-stating document only explicitly identifies one claim, VA must search that document liberally for other less explicitly stated claims."

The court's own image for the sequence is worth keeping: "VA must identify the largest limbs of the tree before examining the smaller offshoots of each branch."

What went wrong in the record

Mr. Bonds served in the Navy from 1988 to 1995. Within a year of discharge he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes at a non-VA hospital — which matters, because diabetes is one of the conditions that can be presumed service connected if diagnosed within a year of leaving service. He began VA treatment in 1999. In 2011 he stepped on a plug, developed a foot infection, and VA physicians in Dayton amputated his right leg below the knee.

In September 2013, with no lawyer, he filed for compensation under 38 U.S.C. §1151 — the route for a disability caused by negligent VA care — for the amputation, plus depression as secondary to it. In that filing he identified himself as a diabetic and asked VA to review his medical records from its Ohio facilities.

Four years later, in June 2017, he filed a formal claim for service connection for the diabetes itself. VA granted it and set the effective date at August 30, 2016. He appealed the date, arguing the 2013 filing should carry it.

The Board denied it with a rule rather than a finding: there is no support for the idea that "the ambiguous claim may be for a benefit of a different type than what the claimant filed for," and "a claim for service connection does not encompass a claim for 38 U.S.C. § 1151 and vice versa."

The court declined to decide whether that is true, because it was an answer to a different question:

"Properly framed, the question here does not turn on the scope of a claim — that is, whether Mr. Bonds's claim under section 1151 can be read to incorporate a claim for service connection for diabetes — but assesses whether the September 2013 filing presents an informal claim for service connection for diabetes that is distinct from any claim under section 1151."

The Board had never asked that. It noted he "did identify as a diabetic" in the 2013 filing and then never discussed whether that reference, alone or together with the records the filing pointed to, amounted to a claim. That is a question of fact, so the court sent it back rather than deciding it.

The dating caveat, which is the most important thing on this page

This case is about a filing made in September 2013, under regulations that no longer exist. The opinion says so directly: VA recognised both formal and informal claims in 2013, and "[i]n March 2015, VA changed its regulation to standardize how claims are filed and eliminated informal claims," so "the analysis in this case pertains only to claims filed under the pre-March 2015 regulations."

Two consequences, and they pull in opposite directions:

• It is still live law for old filings. If you are arguing about an effective date that turns on something you sent VA before March 2015, the sequence this case requires is the sequence VA owed you.
• It is not a reason to leave a condition off a form today. Filing now means a prescribed form and the current rules in 38 C.F.R. §3.155. Nobody should read Bonds as permission to write less down and rely on VA to find the rest. List every condition you are claiming. The case describes a remedy for a document already filed years ago, not a filing strategy.

How VA is supposed to read a filing

The court walked through the standard, and the two Federal Circuit decisions that bound it, because they are the guideposts.

There are three essential requirements to any claim: an intent to apply for benefits, an identification of the benefit sought, and a communication in writing. This case is about the second.

Shea v. Wilkie, 926 F.3d 1362 (Fed. Cir. 2019), opens the four corners. The identification of the benefit "need not be explicit in the claim-stating documents, but can be found indirectly through examination of evidence to which those documents themselves point when sympathetically read." So "VA must look beyond the four corners of those documents when the documents themselves point elsewhere." Applied: "where a claimant's filings refer to specific medical records, and those records contain a reasonably ascertainable diagnosis of a disability, the claimant has raised an informal claim for that disability."

And Sellers v. Wilkie, 965 F.3d 1328 (Fed. Cir. 2020), closes the obvious overreach. A claimant who asked for benefits "for disabilities occurring during active duty service" and pointed at nothing in particular had not identified depression, even at a high level of generality. A general request for "all possible benefits," plus the fact that VA holds your records, is not a claim for everything in them. The duty to assist, the Federal Circuit said, "is not untethered."

The practical distance between those two is small and it is where cases are won: pointing at particular records that contain a particular diagnosis is different from asking VA to look around.

What it does not require is boundless searching. VA must read broadly but is "not required to conjure up issues that were not raised."

Judge Toth's concurrence is the clearest thing in the opinion

He joins in full and writes separately to name a distinction the caselaw had been using without stating: the scope of a pleading and the scope of a claim are different questions, and they have different cases.

• Scope of the pleading — what did this document ask for? Decided on the document's language and the records it refers to. Roberson, Szemraj, Shea, Sellers. Evidence developed later generally does not count.
• Scope of the claim — what does this claim now cover, after development? Decided on the whole record as it grows. Schroeder, Robinson, Clemons, DeLisio.

"Evidentiary development, then, is the crucial difference." And the scope of the pleading comes first: it is "an antecedent consideration" to whether VA developed the claim properly or whether the Board missed an issue the record raised.

If you are reading case law and cannot tell why two decisions seem to say different things about what a claim covers, this is usually the reason. One is about what you filed; the other is about what the file became.

What it does not hold

The court was explicit that the holding is narrow:

• It takes no position on whether a §1151 claim can encompass a service-connection claim under §1110 — the question the Board answered and the Secretary defended.
• It does not decide whether DeLisio's causal-chain rule applies, which was Mr. Bonds's own main argument.
• It is not an award. The Board was told to make a finding it had never made. That finding can go either way.

One smaller point with real practical use: the Board also erred by not addressing an earlier effective date for depression, which appeared in the Supplemental Statement of the Case and which he referenced on his appeal form. An issue you put on the form has to be addressed, even where, as here, neither side argued about it.

Finding the opinion

Published at 35 Vet. App. 445. The official PDF is Bonds v. McDonough, No. 20-4899 in the Veterans Court's document directory.

Note on how carefully this one is verified: the holding here was read against the full official opinion, but no commercial citator was run on it, and no later decision applying it was read. That is the same, slightly weaker, posture recorded for Clemons and Stegall — see sources and corrections.

Reviewed October 6, 2026