When residents feel a bigger pinch from local taxes, political corruption appears to fall and civic engagement rises, according to new research led by WSU.
FILE - A voter casts his ballot in Georgia's 6th Congressional District special election at a polling site in Sandy Springs, Ga. , Tuesday, June 20, 2017.
When residents feel a bigger pinch from local taxes, political corruption appears to fall and civic engagement rises, according to Using county-level data on property taxes and corruption convictions by federal judicial district, the researchers estimated that every 1% increase in tax burden is associated with a 4.3% decrease in convictions for crimes such as bribery, election crimes, conflict of interest and extortion in the subsequent year. The study also found that corruption was greater when there was weak monitoring of government by the opposing party or local news media, and when public officials were paid less relative to other counties — findings the researchers said suggest that closer public attention can help deter corruption.
“When you make people feel their local tax burdens more, like when Whitman County raises my taxes, I care more about what Whitman County’s doing,” said Chase Potter, an assistant professor of accounting in WSU’s Carson College of Business and a co-author of the paper. “And when I care more, public officials will respond, and they’ll behave better when they know people are thinking, ‘What am I getting for my tax dollars?
’”as part of a special conference issue, and it won the conference’s Best Paper Award. Potter’s co-authors included Jeffrey Gramlich, a professor and director of the Hoops Institute of Taxation Policy and Research in the Carson College; Yonsoon Nam, who earned his PhD at WSU and is now at Clemson University; and Aruhn Venkat of the University of California, Riverside. The researchers focused on political corruption, which they described as a crime that undermines public trust in government institutions.
To examine the relationship between corruption and taxation, they used the $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions, known as SALT, that was passed by Congress in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Before the change, taxpayers could write off all state and local taxes. The cap limited that write-off and, the researchers said, heightened taxpayers’ awareness of their local and state tax burden.
The SALT cap was politically controversial, with politicians in high-tax states opposing it both before and after it passed. Congress later raised the SALT deduction to $40,000 for 2025-2029. The study used cross-county comparisons of property tax levels and the SALT deduction cap to calculate individual tax burdens. It also relied on corruption conviction data compiled by the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice for “crimes involving abuses of the public trust.
” Across their analyses, the researchers found that higher tax burdens were associated with fewer corruption convictions in the following year. They also reported that the relationship was stronger in places with more robust monitoring by the out-of-power political party and local journalists, and weaker in counties where public officials were paid less relative to other counties.
“While taxes are often viewed narrowly through an economic lens, they also define the social contract: When people pay into the system, they expect honesty in return,” the authors wrote. “Our evidence supports this notion, showing that when the cost of government to citizens rises, citizens push back against corruption to improve governance. ”A teenage girl died after being pulled from the water at Lake Sammamish State Park on Sunday, according to Eastside Fire & Rescue.
Eastside Fire & Rescue said itIn July 2025, President Donald Trump signed the Big Beautiful Bill into law. It’s estimated to cut federal Medicaid spending by $1 trillion over the next decadeHuman skeletal bones found inside a sleeping bag in a remote section of a Washington park nearly three decades ago were identified as a missing Hawaii man.
Seattle is just hours away from its first FIFA World Cup match, with the city preparing for what officials expect will be a massive game-day surge. A military aircraft crashed near Rimrock Lake on Saturday, sparking a wildfire that prompted a response from local and federal firefighting agencies.
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