The article examines the methods of public governance during the first wave of coronavirus infection in the context of ensuring the national tax security. The authors use the experience of Russia and Poland – two post-socialist countries having the same foundations of administrative and legal systems. The purpose of the paper is to identify and evaluate the effectiveness of public governance methods used by public authorities to support the economic systems of Russia and Poland from the point of view of their impact on national tax security. The methodological basis of the research is the philosophical theory of security within the framework of which the characteristics of such phenomena as security risks and threats, as well as the principles of its provision, have been developed, The authors also used the formal legal interpretation of legal acts to select normative legal acts fixing the applied methods of public administration as well as to clarify their provisions in accordance with the rules of formal logic and jurisprudence. The comparative method was used to select and compare with each other Russian and Polish normative legal acts, Russian and foreign doctrinal sources in the field of theory and practice of public administration, administrative and tax law. The empirical basis of the research consists of normative legal acts and state statistics of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Poland, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The characteristics of tax risks caused by the coronavirus pandemic are revealed, and their correlation with threats to tax security is established. The authors’ classification tax risk governance methods in the context of the coronavirus pandemic is carried out, administrative and economic measures that directly and indirectly affect the tax system are also characterized by the authors. Conclusions are made about the effectiveness of the main tax risk governance measures applied in Russia and Poland, while the Russian measures differ in a wide variety and a high proportion of proactive support measures. The theoretical and practical significance of the research lies in the fact that it allows to identify the existing potential of governance decisions in the event of another wave of a pandemic or the emergence of new crisis phenomena in the economy, accompanied by a reduction in supply and demand in the markets (military conflicts, natural and man-made emergencies, etc.).