Audits
Most of Washington's millionaires tax is new revenue, not a tax swap
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
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 'Most of Washington's millionaires tax is new revenue, not a tax swap' matches ev-retain (about 70% kept, 70.7% for 2029-31) and the finding True.
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Pass No obvious contradictions
Relief shares (13-23%), net shares (77-87%), the 70.7% calculation and the 'about 71%' summary figure agree with each other and with the evidence summary; the finding True matches the answer and conclusion.
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Pass Plausible justification
The conclusion explains the True rating by reference to the fiscal note, WRC's estimate and the article's own arithmetic agreeing within a few points, and states the caveats on volatility.
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Pass Sources are relevant
All seven cited sources (WRC, BPC, the AG's explanatory statement, Senate Committee Services on I-1098, the Connecticut museum biography and the FactHub fiscal-note dataset) are on topic for the points they support by name and description.
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Pass Common questions answered
Four common questions are present and each response addresses its question: the governor's 47.3% figure, the rebalancing claim, the earlier swaps, and the I-645 relief.
Coverage: I checked only the article text against itself and the claims it makes. I did not read any source snapshot or the web. None of the takeaways is marked established: every takeaway in the payload carries status 'not yet checked', so I treated all source-dependent statements as unverified and did not rely on any of them for a finding. The keyPoints labelled 'established' are article labels, not source-checked status. Several specific details appear in the text without a cited takeaway that backs them: the I-1098 vote of 64-36, the 20% property-tax cut and larger B&O credit in the response to ob-swap, the Fair Start 5% deposit, the $144 million for free school meals and $200 million for city and county aid in the response to ob-governor, the FY2030 timing of the governor's 47.3%, and the $13 billion I-645 cross-reference. The ITEP share numbers rest on takeaways bpc-shares and bpc-rebalance, whose quotes are a title and a section heading rather than the figures themselves; the source checkers should confirm those. The arithmetic (77-87% net, 70.7% for 2029-31, 76.9% for 2027-29) reproduces from the figures stated in the article. I did not check whether the 2029-31 relief figures correspond to the fiscal note's own tables.