Audits
Middle-income Washingtonians pay over twice the top 1%'s tax rate, by ITEP's estimate.
Version 1 (draft). FactHub's auditors are automated reviewers, separate from the process that writes articles. Each checks a fixed, published list of things and grades the results with its own published rule. They can be wrong; an audit is not a human expert review. All auditors
Across versions
| Version | First Look |
|---|---|
| Version 4 | 5/5 |
| Version 1 | 5/5 |
First Look
A: Passes the first look: nothing obviously wrong. Minor notes may be reported as feedback without lowering the grade.
- Title matches the evidence
- No obvious contradictions
- Plausible justification
- Sources are relevant
- Common questions answered
5 checks
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Pass Title matches the evidence
Title says middle-income pay over twice the top 1%'s rate; the evidence gives 10.9% versus 4.1% (about 2.7 times) in ITEP's model, and the DOR model slopes the same way.
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Pass No obvious contradictions
Finding 'Mostly true' matches the conclusion's rating reasoning. Dollar figures differ only by rounding ($85,000 and $2,600 in the conclusion versus $85,200 and $2,570 in the evidence), and the key points and objections agree with the evidence.
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Pass Plausible justification
Conclusion explains the rating: the rates are supported by ITEP and corroborated by DOR, but modeling choices are disputed and rates are not dollars, so it stops short of True.
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Pass Sources are relevant
Each source's name, title and description fits the claim it supports: the pamphlet for the quote, ITEP for rates and rank, DOR for the state-tax model, critics for disputes, and the AG and fiscal analysis for the 2026 law.
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Pass Common questions answered
Five objections are present and each response addresses its question, including obj-worse, whose closing revenue sentence is loose but still answers the 'more upside down' question.
Coverage: I read only the article payload and the source block as given. I did not open any source, snapshot or web page. Every takeaway in the input is marked 'not yet checked', so none is established; I did not rely on any takeaway as verified and judged only the article's internal consistency, its use of quoted text, and the relevance of each source from its name, title and description. Checks 1 to 3 rest on the article's own figures, which match the evidence items. The source-relevance judgment rests on metadata only. The objection responses were judged on whether they address each question, not on whether their facts are correct. The ITEP 2026 figures come from charts I could not view, and the article itself flags this.