A Center for Public Integrity investigation into states’ harsh and often counterproductive collections tactics for unpaid income tax has won the January Sidney Award.
The prize is awarded by the Sidney Hillman Foundation to an “outstanding piece of journalism that appeared in the prior month.”
Among the findings: at least nine states can suspend or decline to renew driver’s licenses because of tax debt — Louisiana did so more than 19,000 times last year alone — and at least 16 states and Washington, D.C., can suspend or decline to renew professional licenses for the same reason. Those Catch-22 penalties undercut residents’ ability to pay up.
The Internal Revenue Service, meanwhile, offers far more assistance for taxpayers in financial hardship than most states, Public Integrity discovered.
Read the investigation
Reporters Maya Srikrishnan and Ashley Clarke worked on the piece for more than a year, doggedly finding new avenues to tell the story when states blocked data requests by stalling or quoting outrageously high fees. With help from data reporter Joe Yerardi and editor Jamie Smith Hopkins, they interviewed low-income taxpayer clinic attorneys around the country and surveyed every state with an income tax to understand their collections policies and assistance in hardship cases.
“When we learned about people being stripped of their livelihood by states because of tax debt, it was really important for us to understand how widespread the issue is,” Srikrishnan and Clarke said in a statement. “It surprised us to learn that many of the states that are taking such drastic measures like suspending driver’s and professional licenses aren’t tracking the impact. It may be easy to assume that if someone isn’t paying their taxes, they are intentionally and willfully violating the law, but that wasn’t the case for the people we spoke with. Many of them are caught in the cycle of poverty.”
Last year’s Sidney Award winners included Grist, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
“Srikrishnan and Clarke showed perseverance and ingenuity in their reporting,” Sidney judge Lindsay Beyerstein said in the January award announcement. “Their ongoing coverage of dysfunctional state taxation has shed light on an important driver of economic inequality.”
Public Integrity’s journalists have been recognized with numerous other honors in recent months, including the Paul Tobenkin Award, a Peabody Award nomination, a National Headliner Award, an Excellence in Financial Journalism award, a National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award, the Sigma Award recognizing the world’s best data journalism, two finalist honors for the Shaufler Prize for reporting about underserved people, the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing’s “Best in Business” awards, the Gracie Awards honoring media produced by and for women, the D.C. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Dateline Awards, and the Signal Awards recognizing the country’s best podcasts.
The newsroom also won a national 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence for its portfolio of investigative reporting about inequality in the United States and a separate Murrow Award for Best Feature Reporting.
Founded in 1989, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Center for Public Integrity is one of the oldest nonprofit news organizations in the country and is dedicated to investigating systems and circumstances that contribute to inequality in the United States.