Family Forum / Parenting / Parenting / January 2006

Child support expert reportedly was jailed for child support
January 23, 2006

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.