Maine cancels Alexander contract over plagiarism issues
The state has canceled its contract with the controversial Alexander Group over plagiarism issues that were discovered in its welfare reform reports.
The Bangor Daily News reported that the Maine Department of Health and Human Services announced the termination of the Rhode Island-based Alexander Group’s $925,000 no-bid contract after it found there were “serious problems with citations in the text of two reports.”
The agency is penalizing the Alexander Group with $450,000 in fines, which amounts to nearly half the of the contract’s value and its remaining unpaid balance. The group will be able to keep the $473,760 it has already received from the state.
“We determined there was value contained in the content that was produced under this agreement,” the DHHS said in a prepared statement. “But serious problems with citations in the text of two reports warranted both financial penalties and an end to future work to be performed under the contract.”
First uncovered by the newspaper last month, the consultant’s reports were found to have plagiarized other studies by essentially lifting whole sections of text from them without proper attribution. The state’s hiring of the Alexander last fall had already been a source of contention between Maine Democrats and Republicans because the former group said the consultant was essentially hired to reaffirm Gov. Paul LePage’s stances on welfare reform.
In a prepared statement, Gary Alexander, leader of the Alexander Group, said he remains proud of his firm’s work and downplayed the plagiarism issues.
“We hold ourselves to the highest possible standard of professional conduct,” he wrote. “So much as a comma out of place in a report, or in this case, missing some citations, is a failure on our part to live up to that standard. … But grammatical errors do not undermine the substantive analysis and policy recommendations offered by the reports. Our goal was to give Maine practical reforms to help lift the poor out of poverty and support the neediest like the intellectually disabled, poor children and elderly while delivering value to the taxpayers.”
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