Most people would be surprised to discover their doctor receives significant compensation for serving as a consultant to one or more pharmaceutical companies. Whether that compensation is monetary or “soft dollar” arrangements (free vacation, office supplies or furniture), the risk of medical advice being tainted by potential conflicts of interest is too great of a gamble when it comes to our physical health.

Yet, some people take that very same risk with their financial health by working with investment advisors whose compensation structures are just as riddled with conflicts. So what can you do to surface potential problems and ensure that your advisor is not influenced by factors beyond your personal financial goals?

Seek out a fiduciary. For starters, learn about the legal responsibility or “standard of care” that different advisors have for their clients. Firms providing investment advice are either held to a “suitability standard” or a “fiduciary standard.” Suitability means the advisor is obligated only to recommend investment products that will meet a client’s needs. These products do not necessarily have to have the lowest fees or best performance; they only have to be a suitable option.

So if an advisor is choosing between recommending two funds and receives a commission off the sale of fund A but not fund B, even if fund B offers better performance, lower costs for the client or features more tailored to a client’s needs, there is no legal responsibility to recommend the non-commissioned product as long as fund A is suitable. On the other hand, an advisor who has to meet a fiduciary standard is legally required to put the client’s needs ahead of his or her own. In fact a fiduciary would be breaking the law by not recommending fund B.

Who follows which standards? Typically, brokerage firms are held to a suitability standard while Registered Investment Advisors have a fiduciary responsibility. There can be some gray areas, such as a bank brokering its own products or a broker who charges a separate fee for investment advice. For investors, it is critical to ask, “Which standard of care are you legally held to and are you serving me as a fiduciary?”

Understand how your advisor gets paid. Second, ask a series of questions to find out how and when your advisor makes money on your account: (1) What other sources and forms of compensation do you and the firm receive beyond direct client fees (manager commissions, fee shares, soft-dollar arrangements)? (2) Do you or the firm share fee revenues with any third parties such as investment managers or insurance providers? (3) Does your firm have proprietary products? (4) Is your commission for placing clients in proprietary products higher than or different from non-proprietary products? (5) Do you receive fees based on transactions in an account?

You want to know all the different revenue sources and triggers in order to determine if that person’s investment advice is compromised. These are straightforward questions that should have straightforward answers. If the answers require your advisor to make a call to compliance or you to pore though pages of fine-print documents, those are red flags.

Ultimately, the end responsibility for ensuring independent and objective investment advice falls to the investor. To properly evaluate any advisor, you have to go beyond his or her marketing materials and get to the core issues of client obligation and compensation. These will shed light on how and if investment advice is influenced by other factors. A true independent advisor should be exclusively motivated to serve your best interests and have no other competing sources of revenues beyond client fees.