Child support expert reportedly was jailed for child support

CONCORD, N.H. --New Hampshire nearly awarded a contract to fix its child support guidelines to an economist who had been jailed for failing to pay $7,228 in child support.

R. Mark Rogers of Peachtree City, Ga., was the low bidder at $192,628. In the 1990s in Georgia, Rogers was jailed for failing to pay child support, he acknowledged Monday in an interview with The Telegraph.

His mother had to pay debts to get Rogers out of lockup. He also filed for bankruptcy, which a judge criticized as a ploy to avoid paying child support, the newspaper said.

Gov. John Lynch blocked the contract last week, not because of Rogers' past but because irregularities in the bidding process may have knocked out Rogers' only competitor.

Health and Human Services Commissioner John Stephen said he had not known of Rogers' experiences with child support delinquency. "I knew nothing about this," Stephen said Monday. "Is he still delinquent?"

During a telephone interview Monday, Rogers said he got in trouble because Georgia's child support guidelines, like New Hampshire's, were antiquated and based on low-income households that don't take into account federal income taxes paid by higher-wage workers.

"Even though I had a very good job at the Federal Reserve Bank of Georgia, I was not able to pay my child support. At one point, I did fall behind," Rogers said. Within four months of his 1991 divorce, Spalding County records confirm, Rogers could not keep up with the court-ordered monthly payments of $920 for two children. After a judge ordered him to pay up, Rogers complied, but soon ran into the delinquency that jailed him.

At the time, Rogers was making $49,000 a year, while his wife paying no child support was earning $29,500 as a teacher.

The trouble with his own child support payments, he said, has enriched his analyses, he said.

"Because of my personal involvement, I have made sure my economic analysis is squeaky clean," Rogers said.

Bankruptcy Judge W. Homer Drake Jr. said Rogers' filing for bankruptcy in 1993 was "repugnant."

In January 1997, Rogers filed a racketeering and corruption suit against his ex-wife, her lawyer, her attorney's lawyer, Drake and the three lower court judges who had ruled against him. A federal appeals court judge dismissed the suit the following year.

Lynch, unaware of that controversy until Monday, blocked the contract last Thursday from going to the Executive Council's agenda this Thursday.

"The governor had concerns that the evaluation process wasn't followed with complete integrity and he's not going to move forward on anything like that," Lynch's communications director, Pamela Walsh, said.

"Hearing about these other issues today raises questions about how this item got to the governor's desk in the first place," she said.

Stephen responded that the low bidder was found to be qualified.

Independent of Rogers' own problems, Lynch blocked the contract due to a dispute over the ratings of Rogers and his competitor by the six-member team that evaluated the bidders.

The other bidder, Policy Studies Inc., of Denver, a much larger company, offered to do the work for about 10 percent more, $209,626. PSI is a much larger company.

Applied Economic Research President Russell Thibeault, who evaluated the companies, said both were qualified. The conflict arose when one of the reviewers, Dr. Eugene Berg, a Bedford orthopedic surgeon, told the panel PSI had a conflict of interest because it devised New Hampshire's guidelines and is in the business of helping states collect child support.

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Information from: The Telegraph, http://www.nashuatelegraph.com