In 2002, the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment awarded Accenture a contract to re-engineer the state’s unemployment insurance system. The system was supposed to be online in 2004, but by December 2005, Accenture had only completed three of five subsystems, and the two largest components were still incomplete. The state declared Accenture to be in breach of the contract and launched confidential negotiations with the company to resolve the matter. Accenture and the state mutually agreed to terminate the contract. Accenture refunded $8.2 million of the $35.7 million the state paid for the system up to that time, and the state withheld the remaining payments.