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Some big retirement plans offer investors the chance to hire an independent adviser that can help them choose their investments. But your plan provider will soon be able to offer the advice itself, as long as it meets rules issued recently by the Department of Labor. Before the new regulations, which are effective Dec. 27, 401(k), individual retirement plan providers were required to hire an independent adviser to provide advice. That's because the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the law known as Erisa that governs retirement plans, prohibited advisers from recommending investments if they were paid for other services like administering the plans in the first place. This was to avoid conflicts of interest where the administrator would put its own mutual funds on the menu and push them on participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]