This paper investigates the role of board characteristics in the relationship between tax avoidance behavior and corporate risk tolerance to elucidate the importance of corporate governance mechanisms. The applied methodology is System-GMM for 334 listed corporations in Vietnam from 2008 to 2020 to avoid endogenous problems in our models. The main findings are that higher (lower) corporate risk-taking is related to higher (lower) corporate tax avoidance if the size of the board of directors and the supervisory board are larger (lower) than six and three members, respectively. Furthermore, if the board independence ratio is lower than 48.63%, an increase in corporate risk-taking leads to increased tax avoidance. Our results support the argument that the influence of corporate risk-taking on tax avoidance behavior is governed by governance structure. Therefore, the practical implications will be towards building the optimal governance mechanism for enterprises in Vietnam.