To check a financial advisor's record, search their full name in two public databases: adviserinfo.sec.gov for investment advisers and the people who work for them, and brokercheck.finra.org for brokers and brokerage firms. Both are open to anyone, both cost nothing, and together they cover nearly every licensed person who can charge you for advice. The review takes about eight minutes. The part that decides everything is the section labeled Disclosures, and the skill is knowing which entries are ordinary friction and which are a reason to keep looking.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is blunt about why this matters. Its investor education site states that "Unlicensed, unregistered persons commit much of the investment fraud in the United States," and it points the public to exactly these two databases in its guidance on checking out your investment professional. You do not need a compliance background. You need a name, a browser, and some patience.
Check Both Databases, Because Many Advisors Appear in Both
A lot of people in this business hold two registrations at once. They are a representative of an investment adviser firm, and they are also registered with a brokerage firm so they can accept commissions on certain products. If you check only one database, you see half the person.
BrokerCheck reports carry a summary, registration history, the qualification exams passed, previous employers, and the disclosure section. FINRA keeps an individual's report available for ten years after their registration ends, and longer in certain serious cases, while firm records stay up permanently. That ten year window matters, because someone who left the industry and came back may show a thinner record than their actual history.
The adviser side of the house is where the documents live. On adviserinfo.sec.gov you can open the firm's actual filings, including Form ADV Part 1, the Part 2A brochure, the Part 2B brochure supplement for the individual, and Form CRS. These are the firm's own words about how it makes money.
If you cannot find a person in either system, that is a finding, not a dead end. It usually means they are licensed only to sell insurance products, which state insurance departments regulate rather than the SEC or FINRA. That is a very different disclosure environment. Our explainer on annuities covers why the sales structure differs.
What a Disclosure Event Actually Is
A disclosure is a reportable event that the person or firm was required to file. The main categories are customer disputes, regulatory actions, criminal matters, terminations of employment, civil judicial matters, and financial matters such as a bankruptcy, judgment, or lien.
Three things are worth understanding before you read a single one.
First, a disclosure is not a conviction. FINRA notes that some items reflect pending actions or allegations that have not been resolved or proven. A customer can file a complaint after a bad year in the market and be entirely wrong about the cause.
Second, the record can be edited. Under FINRA Rule 2080, a broker who wants customer dispute information removed from the central registration system must obtain a court order or an arbitration award granting expungement. A clean report is good news, but it is not proof of an uneventful career.
Third, not everything has to be reported. A customer complaint that settles below the industry reporting threshold can stay off the record entirely, a threshold FINRA has revised over the years (Regulatory Notice 09-23). The record is a floor, not a ceiling.
So you are reading for the shape of the entries, not the presence of one: count, spacing in time, product involved, and how each resolved.
Form ADV Part 2A: Four Items Worth Your Attention
The Part 2A brochure runs eighteen numbered items and is written for investors rather than regulators. The SEC's own investor bulletin on Form ADV walks through the structure. Four items carry most of the weight.
Item 5, Fees and Compensation. How the firm gets paid, its fee schedule, whether fees are negotiable, whether billing happens in advance or in arrears, and the other costs you carry, such as custody charges, trading costs, and fund expenses. Read it next to the number you were quoted verbally. If the two do not match, you have found something. The long term cost of a fee difference is larger than most people expect, which we walked through in what a 1 percent higher fee costs on a 500K portfolio.
Item 9, Disciplinary Information. Material legal or disciplinary events, generally covering the previous ten years. The useful trick is to compare Item 9 against the BrokerCheck disclosure list for the same person. Item 9 uses a materiality standard, so a firm can honestly say "none" while individual events exist elsewhere. A mismatch is not automatically damning, but it is a fair question to ask out loud.
Item 10, Other Financial Industry Activities and Affiliations. This is the item most people skip and the one that most often explains the advice. An affiliated insurance agency, a brokerage registration, a related fund, a shared ownership interest. None are disqualifying by themselves. All of them shape what gets recommended.
Item 14, Client Referrals and Other Compensation. Whether anyone other than you compensates the firm, and whether the firm pays third parties for introductions. If a recommendation arrives with an economic reason behind it, this is usually where the reason is written down.
Do not skip the Part 2B brochure supplement either. It is six items covering the individual: education, business experience, disciplinary events, other business activities, additional compensation, and who supervises them.
Form CRS: Two Pages, One Question That Matters
Form CRS is the relationship summary that both brokerage firms and adviser firms must give retail investors, including firms that operate as both. It covers services, fees and costs, conflicts of interest, the standard of conduct that applies, and legal or disciplinary history, plus a short list of conversation starter questions the regulators want you to ask.
The single most efficient line in the document is the disciplinary history answer. It is a yes or no, on page one or two, in ordinary English. It cannot be buried in a footnote.
Form CRS also states the standard of conduct that applies to the relationship, which is not the same thing as the marketing language on a website. If that distinction is fuzzy, we covered it in are they a fiduciary or just really good at faking it.
Which Findings Are Noise and Which Are a Walk Away
Most disclosure entries are not scandals. A handful are. Here is how the common ones tend to sort out.
Side by Side
| Disclosure type | What it usually signals | Ask or walk away |
|---|---|---|
| Single customer complaint from 20 years ago | Often a market loss dispute, denied or withdrawn | Ask about it |
| Personal bankruptcy or tax lien | Financial stress at a point in time, context matters | Ask about it |
| Pattern of settled sales practice complaints | Repeat conduct, often clustered on one product | Walk away |
| Borrowing money from a client | Prohibited by rule outside narrow exceptions | Walk away |
| Outside business activity never disclosed to the firm | No supervisory review of the side venture | Walk away |
| Unpaid customer arbitration award | A customer won and never collected | Walk away |
Each of the bottom three rows maps to a specific rule.
Borrowing from customers is addressed by FINRA Rule 3240, titled Prohibition on Borrowing From or Lending to Customers. The default is no, and the exceptions are narrow and require written firm procedures. Seeing this on a record means someone crossed a line the industry drew on purpose.
Undisclosed outside business activity runs against FINRA Rule 3270, which requires prior written notice to the firm before a registered person takes on outside work or compensation. The point of the rule is supervision. An undisclosed venture means nobody was watching it.
Unpaid arbitration awards may be the most underrated signal of all. FINRA publishes a running list of firms and individuals with unpaid customer arbitration awards, and the entry also appears on the BrokerCheck report. A customer went through the process, won, and was never made whole.
The pattern that should worry you most is not one dramatic event. It is three or four settled complaints, spread over several years, all involving the same product category. That is not bad luck. That is a business model.
What the Public Record Will Never Show You
A clean record tells you what has not gone wrong. It does not tell you whether the work is any good.
Nothing in BrokerCheck or Form ADV reveals whether someone coordinates tax planning across a whole retirement, models a Roth conversion against future Medicare surcharges, or explains a required minimum distribution to a client before the year it starts. Those are competence questions, and the public record is silent on all of them.
That is why the background check is step one, not the decision. Step two is a conversation, and the questions worth asking are laid out in our guide to working with a financial advisor.
How to Ask About What You Found
If you find an entry, ask about it directly and early. The wording that works: "I pulled your BrokerCheck report and saw a customer dispute from 2011. Walk me through what happened." Then listen for the shape of the answer rather than the content. A person with one old complaint usually explains it in thirty seconds, without heat, and moves on. Defensiveness, or a lecture about how everyone in the industry has complaints, is more informative than the disclosure itself.
Then check the answer against the documents. If Item 10 lists an affiliated insurance agency and the advisor says there are no commissions anywhere in the practice, you have a discrepancy in writing. That is the whole point of doing the reading first.
How Advisors Are Vetted Against This Standard
This post defined what good looks like. Here is the standard the advisor network at The Right Retirement Plan is vetted against, and it mirrors this same checklist.
Credentials are verified before an advisor joins, not taken on faith. Years of experience are confirmed. Regulatory history is reviewed as part of admission rather than assumed to be clean. The orientation is education first rather than product sales, which is the difference between a planning conversation and a presentation. Each advisor runs an independent practice. Each is held to a fiduciary standard when advising. Coverage is nationwide, and the match is one advisor to one reader's situation rather than a list of names to sort through yourself. You can read more about how advisor matching works, and browse the education library without talking to anyone at all.
The Right Retirement Plan does not manage money, hold assets, or give personalized advice. It is an education and matching hub, and each advisor in the network runs an independent practice.
Eight minutes of reading will not tell you whether someone is the right fit for your retirement. It will tell you whether the conversation is worth having at all, and it will hand you three or four specific questions that most people never think to ask. That is a fair trade for an evening. The reading is public, the documents belong to you, and nobody has to know you looked.