VA tries twice for your private records. Then it decides without them.

This is the part of the duty to assist that people assume is stronger than it is, and the assumption is expensive.

For records held by a Federal agency — your service treatment records, VA treatment records, Social Security files — VA "will make as many requests as are necessary," and may stop only if it concludes the records do not exist or that further efforts would be futile.

For records held by anyone else — your own doctor, a hospital, a physical therapist, a civilian psychologist, a former employer — the standard is different:

"VA will make reasonable efforts to obtain relevant records not in the custody of a Federal department or agency… Such reasonable efforts will generally consist of an initial request for the records and, if the records are not received, at least one follow-up request."

Two requests. If your doctor's office is slow, or files it in the wrong pile, or has changed billing companies since you were last seen, that is often the end of it.

What happens next is the part to read twice

When VA cannot get the records, it must tell you. 38 C.F.R. §3.159(e)(1) sets out what that notice has to contain, and two of the four items are the ones that matter:

"(iii) A description of any further action VA will take regarding the claim, including, but not limited to, notice that VA will decide the claim based on the evidence of record unless the claimant submits the records VA was unable to obtain; and (iv) A notice that the claimant is ultimately responsible for providing the evidence."

So the decision gets made on what is in the file. Not on what exists, not on what you told them about — on what is in the file. And the regulation says plainly whose job it is to close that gap.

That notice is easy to miss. It arrives as one more piece of VA mail among several, and it does not look like a deadline. It is the most important letter you will get before the decision.

So do both

Authorise VA to request them and request them yourself. The two are not alternatives and doing both is not wasted effort.

Authorising VA is VA Form 21-4142, Authorization to Disclose Information to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Its companion 21-4142a collects the provider list itself — names, addresses, and the dates you were seen. There is an online option on that page. The regulation also requires that your authorisation be "in a form acceptable to the person, company, agency, or other custodian holding the records," which in practice means some offices will want their own release signed as well as VA's.

Requesting them yourself is a right you have under federal health privacy law, and it is stronger than most people realise.

Your own right of access, with the numbers

Under 45 C.F.R. §164.524, a provider must act on your request within 30 days. They may take one extension of up to 30 more days, and only if they give you written notice of the delay and the date you will get the records, inside the original window.

What they can charge is limited to a reasonable, cost-based fee covering only:

• labour for copying the information you asked for;
• supplies for the paper copy or the electronic media;
• postage, if you asked for it to be mailed;
• preparing an explanation or summary, and only if you agreed to that in advance.

That is the whole list. Search fees, retrieval fees, and per-page charges built around administrative overhead are not on it. If a records company quotes you a figure that looks like a surcharge, the rule is worth citing back to them.

Ask for an electronic copy where one exists. It is usually cheaper, it arrives faster, and it is already in the form you need to upload it.

Ask for the right thing

A request that says "my records" gets whatever is easy to print — often a visit summary, which is nearly useless.

Name what you want:

• A date range, generous at both ends. The year before the symptom started matters as much as the year after.
• The complete chart, not a summary: office notes, imaging reports, laboratory results, referral letters, and the notes from anyone they sent you to.
• Every provider separately. The hospital does not hold your chiropractor's notes, and the practice you left in 2014 may still hold the records that cover the gap.

Providers close, merge and are bought. Records from a practice that no longer exists are sometimes held by whoever acquired it, sometimes by a commercial storage company, and sometimes by the state's medical board process for abandoned records. That is worth chasing early, because it is slow.

Why private records often carry more weight than VA ones

Not because they are better written, but because of where they sit in time.

VA treatment usually starts after you enrolled. The years between service and that point are frequently the years the whole claim turns on — and the only record of them is civilian. A chiropractor's notes from 2009, a walk-in clinic visit, the orthopaedist your employer's insurance sent you to: those are the documents that show a condition did not appear out of nowhere the month you filed.

They also tend to be contemporaneous in a way nothing produced for a claim can be. Nobody wrote them with a rating in mind, which is exactly what makes them persuasive. Buchanan holds that the Board cannot find your statements not credible merely because no record from the time says the same thing — but a record from the time that does say it closes the argument rather than winning it.

What this does not do

It does not make you your own representative. Gathering records and deciding which of them help is two different jobs, and the second one is what an accredited representative does — free, through a VSO. Handing them a complete set of records rather than a list of places you have been is the single most useful thing you can do before that first meeting.

It does not change a deadline. An outstanding records request pauses nothing. See dates and deadlines.

It does not mean sending everything. Records that are genuinely unrelated add volume and nothing else. If you are unsure whether something helps, that is a question for your representative rather than a reason to send it or withhold it.

Next: how to get documents to VA · what each kind of evidence can establish · your VA records and the C-File

Reviewed October 7, 2026