Audits
Ten payments supplied half of Washington's first-year capital gains tax.
Version 3. 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
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
The title says the 10 largest payments supplied half of first-year revenue, and the DOR decile evidence shows 51% for tax year 2022. The claim's swing figures match the DOR collections evidence ($782.0M, $394.7M, $583.8M, about $1.5B).
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Pass No obvious contradictions
The answer, key points, evidence summaries and conclusion agree on the headline figures. The $394.3M top-10 total less $129.1M in 2023 gives the stated $265.2M drop, and 1.48 and 0.84 ratios recompute from the stated totals. The 2023-25 and 2025-27 biennium figures refer to different periods and do not conflict.
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Pass Plausible justification
The conclusion explains the True rating by pointing to DOR's own payment records, the swing figures, the 1.48x first-year and 16% later-year comparisons to the fiscal note, and the 2023 drop attributable to the top 10 payers. That reasoning follows from the cited evidence.
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Pass Sources are relevant
Sources are DOR decile and collection pages, the 2021 and 2025 fiscal notes, the state forecast council, RCW 82.87.030, a Bloomberg Law report on state officials, and a Research Council piece. Each is plausibly on topic for the figure it supports, and the advocacy source is disclosed as such.
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Pass Common questions answered
There are five objections, each with a response that addresses its question: windfall, surcharge, one-year fluke, ten people, and the income tax analogy. Responses are direct and give figures or limits.
Coverage: Read the article payload only: title, claim, finding, answer, conclusion, key points, evidence items with summaries and limitations, objections with responses, sources with descriptions and takeaways, method and editorial note. Did not open source snapshots or the web, as instructed. Every takeaway is marked not yet checked, none is marked established, so no source figure was treated as verified; the checks rest on internal consistency and the article's own statements of its sources. The figures I recomputed (the 51% share, 85.6% top-tenth share, 73% of the drop, the 1.48 and 0.84 ratios, and the collection percentage changes) match internally. Not examined: the sections 302 and 205 reference in the income-tax objection, and the $1,258 million 2025-27 biennium figure, which appears only in the fh-fn25 takeaway and the objection rather than in an established source. Nothing here was judged on source accuracy, which is for the Source Checker.