During the COVID‐19 pandemic, states imposed restrictions intended to slow the spread of the virus. We investigate whether states' reliance on consumption tax revenue, relative to other tax revenue sources, is associated with the duration of COVID‐19 mobility restrictions. We find that states that are more dependent on consumption taxes experienced shorter durations of stay‐at‐home orders, restaurant closures, and bar closures. We conduct a series of analyses to mitigate concerns that state‐level political preferences and biases may be influencing our findings. Our findings suggest that anticipated shortfalls in consumption tax revenue may have shaped public health responses, consistent with tax system structures relating, unintentionally, to crisis management decisions.

Given that tax‐related critical audit matters (tax CAMs) were prevalent among accelerated filers (18.5% of observations) during the initial year of CAM disclosures, we examine whether an auditor's disclosure of tax CAMs is associated with variation in tax‐related financial reporting quality, tax avoidance, and tax‐related earnings management. Finding an association between tax CAMs and one of these tax outcomes would indicate that the new auditor reporting standard has indirectly affected investors. Examining the first year of CAM disclosures, we do not find that tax CAMs are associated with broad proxies of tax‐related audit or financial reporting quality (e.g., restatements, internal control weaknesses, comment letters) or tax avoidance (e.g., effective tax rates or book‐to‐tax differences). We do find that tax CAMs are associated with a modest increase in tax accrual quality, an increase in the reserve for unrecognized tax benefits, and a reduction in the likelihood of tax‐related earnings management. However, we do not find these tax CAM effects persist into the second year of CAM reporting. Our evidence is consistent with tax CAM disclosures having a modest but short‐lived effect on companies' reporting of tax accounts. Our findings should inform the PCAOB as they conduct their post‐implementation review of the new audit reporting standard.