  In this note we give a characterization of taut Riemannian foliations using
the transverse divergence. This result turns out to be a convenient tool in the
case of some standard examples. Furthermore, we show that a classical tautness
result of Haefliger can be obtained in our particular setting as a
straightforward consequence. In the final part of the paper we obtain a
tautness characterization for transversally oriented foliations with dense
leaves and investigate the case of a submanifold of lower dimension which is
closed and orthogonal to the leaves.
