Good morning. Wells Fargo’s principal regulator has said the bank has a massive backlog of employee human-resources complaints and poor controls around pay, a rebuke that adds to the long list of problems facing the lender’s new chief executive.

The bank has been at pains to demonstrate since the October hiring of Charles Scharf as CEO that it is making progress repairing the regulatory messes that emerged after a 2016 fake-account scandal, which upended Wells Fargo’s reputation as a staid mortgage lender and forced out some of its top executives.

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The HR complaints came in a July letter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and laid out a lengthy to-do list, people familiar with the matter said. Among the issues the HR department needs to address, the regulator said, are thousands of employee complaints, an inadequate policy for clawing back compensation from executives and controls around pay that aren’t tight enough to ward off potential misconduct, the people said.

“We do not comment on specific regulatory matters, however, Wells Fargo is making progress on our regulatory obligations but more work needs to be done,” a bank spokeswoman said.

Most big banks are evaluating risks associated with a warming planet, often using projections about future weather conditions to assess how their loan books would perform, according to Fitch Ratings.

Seventy-three percent of large banks—those with more than $500 billion in assets—take climate change into account in their risk-management framework, according to survey data published Wednesday by Fitch. Only 38% of midsize banks banks—those with between $100 billion and $500 billion in assets—are evaluating climate-related risk factors, according to the survey of 182 banks across the world.

One reason for the push among big banks to understand climate risks is that regulators, particularly in Europe, have made the issue a priority, according to Monsur Hussain, senior director at Fitch.

The U.K. Prudential Regulation Authority, for instance, this year published expectations for how banks and insurers should manage the potential financial risks stemming from climate change. Federal Reserve officials, meanwhile, also have raised concerns about how weather-related events could affect the financial system.

—Kristin Broughton

The Justice Department’s criminal division is trying to limit protracted back-and-forth negotiations over the size of penalties when settling allegations of misconduct with corporations, an official said.

Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski, the head of the department’s criminal division—which overseas various white-collar criminal investigations—said the DOJ has sought to reduce the time it takes to negotiate resolutions by grounding proposed fines in U.S. sentencing guidelines and other objective criteria.

“It’s not a number taken out of the sky that’s going to be cut in half two or three times just to get to an easy resolution,” he said during a question-and-answer session following a speech on the Justice Department’s recent efforts to enforce the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

A U.S. cryptocurrency expert is facing a federal charge after allegedly providing information that could help North Koreans evade U.S. sanctions, the U.S. Justice Department said. Virgil Griffith, a U.S. citizen living in Singapore, is charged with conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. 

Mr. Griffith traveled to North Korea through China in the spring to attend a cryptocurrency conference in Pyongyang, according to a complaint unsealed in Manhattan federal court. While there, he gave a presentation that was approved in advance by North Korean officials and participated in discussions about using blockchain and cryptocurrency technology to evade sanctions and launder money, the complaint said.

Join The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 10 in London for a discussion about regulatory risk and geopolitics with Anna Bradshaw, a partner on the business crime team at Peters & Peters Solicitors; Neil Donovan, a senior associate at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer; and Sophie Heading, global geopolitics lead at KPMG International. To register, click here.

China said it would retaliate if the U.S. presses forward with sanctions over Beijing’s repression of Uighur Muslims—Washington’s second stand on China human rights in recent days, with trade talks facing uncertainty.

After the House of Representatives passed a bill requiring sanctions on officials responsible for the widespread detention of Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang region, Beijing issued furious statements Wednesday calling it interference with China’s internal affairs under the pretext of human rights.

The bill must be reconciled with a version passed by the Senate in September before it can become law.

• A former United Auto Workers vice president and ex-General Motors director has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, the latest in an unfolding corruption probe into the union’s leadership.
   
• Huawei Technologies filed a fresh legal challenge against the U.S., seeking to block a Federal Communications Commission decision last month that further restricts the Chinese telecom giant’s ability to operate there.
   
• Venezuela’s baseball league has received a license from the U.S. Treasury that potentially paves the way for players affiliated with Major League Baseball to participate despite U.S.-imposed economic sanctions against the South American country.
   
• Hospital groups sued to block a Trump administration rule forcing them to disclose secret rates, for the first time laying out the industry’s legal strategy for defeating the president’s central health-policy initiative.
   
• The U.S. has “serious concerns” with proposals being discussed in the global rewrite of corporate tax rules, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said. In a letter to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Mr. Mnuchin cited concerns from U.S. businesses about a potential emerging agreement and offered a new idea that could complicate or delay a deal.

• House Backs Bill to Curb Robocalls
• Shipping Faces New Headwinds in Meeting Emissions Rules

Financial regulators identified fast-growing mortgage lending companies as a potential source of instability in the U.S. financial system, while finding that overall risks are moderate.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council in a report highlights mortgage companies as a source of risk for the first time, Treasury officials said. The lenders aren’t regulated as closely as banks.

Other financial risks identified in the report include historically high levels of borrowing by nonfinancial companies and the growth of digital assets such as bitcoin. The council, which includes representatives from the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, is expected to stop short of recommending specific actions to curb potentially problematic activities.

• Regional banks are struggling to move away from the troubled London interbank offered rate, saying alternatives to the key benchmark for variable-rate debt could hurt their ability to make new loans. Those banks, including PNC Financial Services Group, Regions Financial Corp. and U.S. Bancorp, say they are concerned the new secured overnight financing rate, or SOFR, could notch outsize drops at times of economic stress.
   
• Morgan Stanley’s wealth-management unit found in an analysis of earnings that more than a third of S&P 500 companies have posted a year-over-year decline in earnings in 2019. The last times the share of companies posting contracting earnings was that high: 2009, 2008 and 2002, all periods when the broader economy, plus the stock market, were in decline.
   
• Auto makers will likely recall 1.4 million cars after new problems were discovered with air bags produced in the 1990s by Takata Corporation, opening another front in the already giant effort to make sure drivers are safe from some devices made by the company.

The Swiss stock exchange accused beleaguered money manager GAM Holding of accounting misstatements connected to its 2016 acquisition of a U.K. hedge fund.

Zurich’s SIX exchange said it is seeking a sanction against GAM for understating financial liabilities in its 2017 financial statements, a result of failing to recognize a liability stemming from the acquisition.

The company disagreed in a statement, saying it “takes its financial reporting responsibility very seriously, disagrees with the position taken by SIX and stands by its previously published consolidated financial statements.” GAM has filed an objection to the sanctions proposal, the company added.

• Companies are increasingly likely to correct accounting problems by quietly updating past numbers, rather than alerting investors and reissuing financial statements. The number of Big R restatements—when a company has to alert investors and reissue its financial statements after finding a serious accounting error—has fallen from a peak of 973 in 2005, just after the requirement to alert investors began, to 119 last year. 

Expedia Group’s chief executive and finance chief were both forced to resign after clashing with Chairman Barry Diller and the board over the direction of the travel company.

The website that helps users find hotel rooms and flights said that CEO Mark Okerstrom and financial chief Alan Pickerill would step down immediately from their roles, at the behest of the board. Expedia’s brands include Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire and CarRentals.com.

Online-focused travel companies are struggling to navigate shifts in how Google delivers information to consumers who use its search engine to plan travel. The travel companies say the changes have made their hotel listings less visible.

A vast labor pool once powered China’s economy. Low-paid workers kept factory costs down, while expansion-minded companies relied on college graduates for basic accounting, sales and other entry-level white-collar tasks.

Now, as China’s economy matures, low-skilled labor is a spent resource. It can’t be a spur for the kind of easy growth China has enjoyed as an emerging economy, and could be a drag in a future likely to be defined by specialized services and smart manufacturing. For China’s leaders, that means a race to create a more productive and professional workforce.

• Order books for heavy-duty truck manufacturers are thinning out as a weaker U.S. industrial economy pushes fleet operators to put the brakes on plans to expand freight-carrying capacity.
   
• Ryanair Holdings said it would cut jobs and close two bases as it warned traffic growth would slow next year because of new delays in deliveries of its first Boeing 737 MAX aircraft.

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Send comments to the Risk & Compliance editor, Jack Hagel, at jack.hagel@wsj.com