The introduction to this morning’s newsletter was written by Mengqi Sun.

Good morning. Compliance officers are facing a shifting risk and regulatory landscape, as the business world continues to grapple with difficulties arising from the coronavirus pandemic.

About 52% of 183 corporate compliance professionals recently surveyed by The Wall Street Journal for today’s WSJ Risk & Compliance Forum said they had spent significantly more time on regulatory scrutiny this year, compared with 29% last year. More compliance officers also said the time consumed by supply-chain disruptions had increased dramatically over 2020.

[Continued below...]

With these pressures in mind, this year’s forum will look at how compliance officers are having to rethink their role, which now also encompasses an increased emphasis on diversity and inclusion as well as issues of environmental, social and corporate governance. Chief compliance officers from biopharmaceutical company Amgen Inc. and information-technology company Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. also are expected to share how they navigate new working arrangements prompted by the pandemic and the ongoing digital transformation of their businesses.

Today’s gathering also will include sessions on the new scrutiny on money-laundering, with views from AML professionals at Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc., as well as from the U.S. Justice Department’s section chief on money-laundering and asset recovery. A senior official at the White House’s National Security Council will also discuss the evolving U.S. approach to sanctions under the Biden administration.

Other sessions will cover cybercrime risk, compliance on cryptocurrencies, ESG reporting, antitrust issues within mergers and acquisitions, and more. We invite you to check out the Risk & Compliance Journal landing page as well as tomorrow’s newsletter for the latest coverage.

USAA, the financial services group that caters to military personnel and their families, has hired away two executives from Wells Fargo & Co. for its risk management team.

Mani Sulur leads all risk management efforts for USAA Federal Savings Bank. At Wells Fargo, he most recently served as an executive vice president and control executive for its consumer-lending businesses.

George Stamatelatos leads teams overseeing USAA's financial risks, including credit, market, interest rate and liquidity, among other responsibilities. In his previous role at Wells Fargo, he served as chief audit director and was responsible for the bank’s consumer-lending audit team.

Messrs. Sulur and Stamatelatos will be based at the company’s new headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., when it opens in February. They will report to Neeraj Singh, chief risk officer and executive vice president.

—David Smagalla

Chinese President Xi Jinping is launching a sweeping round of inspections of financial institutions. According to people with knowledge of the plan, the inspections, announced in September with few details, focus on whether state-owned banks, investment funds and financial regulators have become too chummy with private firms, especially some that have recently landed in Beijing’s crosshairs, such as property giant China Evergrande Group, ride-hailing company Didi Global Inc. and financial-technology firm Ant Group.

The examination, which is led by China’s top anticorruption agency and centers on 25 financial institutions at the heart of the Chinese economy, is the most extensive of a sector Mr. Xi has been suspicious of since coming to power nearly a decade ago.

• Damian Williams began work this week as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He is steeped in financial-crime prosecutions and has been involved in several high-profile white-collar trials that are the hallmark of the office.

Amazon.com Inc. expects that some corporate employees will work remotely for the foreseeable future, as the tech behemoth once again changed its return-to-office plans. Chief Executive Andy Jassy said in a memo to employees Monday that corporate team directors will now decide if staff need to work from the office.

“We expect that there will be teams that continue working mostly remotely, others that will work some combination of remotely and in the office, and still others that will decide customers are best served having the team work mostly in the office,” Mr. Jassy said. Amazon is the latest company to add flexibility to its remote work options and suggest that some adjustments made during the pandemic are likely to outlast it.

• Return of Office Workers Reaches Pandemic High

• The extended climb in oil prices is leaving some other industrial commodities behind, a divergence that reflects bets that energy supply shortages will offset any slowdown in the global economy.
   
• Southwest Airlines Co. scrapped about 10% of its Monday flight schedule, following hundreds of earlier cancellations over the weekend, as the carrier struggles to balance worker shortfalls, packed planes and a busy flight schedule.

Chevron Corp. said it has an “aspiration” to reduce or offset carbon emissions from its operations to zero by 2050, as investor and public pressure mounts on oil producers to respond to climate change. The company on Monday also for the first time set a target for reducing the intensity of the carbon emissions from the fuel and other products it makes, though it didn’t set an outright reduction goal for those products.

Nearly 61% of its shareholders voted earlier this year in support of a proposal that the company substantially reduce emissions from its products—a stance that Chevron had urged investors to reject.

• Hasbro Inc.’s abrupt leadership change this week leaves the toy company in the hands of lieutenants to navigate selling strategies and supply-chain challenges during a make-or-break time of the year. The maker of Nerf blasters and Monopoly board games said late Sunday that Chief Executive Brian Goldner, 58 years old, has taken a medical leave of absence.
   
• Alan Horn, the longtime head of Walt Disney Co.’s studio operations, announced he is retiring from the company at the end of the year, joining an exodus of executives departing Disney alongside Executive Chairman Robert Iger.
   
• Environmentalists scored a win against a corporate giant last year when Procter & Gamble Co. shareholders backed a proposal asking the maker of Charmin toilet paper and Bounty paper towel to report on its efforts to address deforestation. This year, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and several dozen descendants of P&G’s founding families are lobbying shareholders to vote against longtime director Angela Braly.

• U.S. businesses are panning the Biden administration’s new China trade policy, saying it fails to provide the tariff relief they expected for importers who lack cost-effective alternatives to Chinese products. The complaints are coming from companies that rely on Chinese electronic components and other parts to manufacture goods, and from retailers that import shoes and skirts from China.
   
• The sunshine and breezes that make Brazil’s beaches a tourist destination have also drawn a large share of the world’s investment in solar and wind power to the country in recent years. Project developers are hoping that a drought that is sapping Brazil’s usually reliable supply of hydropower will spur further growth. In the latest illustration of the challenges involved in cutting greenhouse gases, the same drought is pushing up fossil-fuel consumption too.
   
• California is opening an investigation into the oil spill off its southern coast, state Attorney General Rob Bonta said. Mr. Bonta said his office would determine whether civil or criminal action should be taken.

The U.S. cyber agency wants to avoid the R-word. “We’re not a regulator,” Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said last week at a conference hosted by cybersecurity company Mandiant Inc. “We don’t want to be a regulator.” Legislation in Congress could push CISA into such a role by giving the agency power to write rules forcing companies to report hacks, subpoena them for information and potentially fine noncompliant firms, businesses say.

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

Subscribe to The Morning Risk Report here.

Follow us on Twitter at @WSJRisk, @_MengqiSun and @dgtokar.