The collapse of the $899 million deal with Accenture LLP should serve as a valuable lesson to the Legislature that certain duties — particularly taking care of poor families and children — should not be turned over to private companies.

Profit is the bottom line for companies, many of which must answer to shareholders. But the objective in providing social services is different. A Republican-controlled Legislature rushed to privatize enrollment services for Medicaid, food stamps and the Children's Health Insurance Program without first establishing that private vendors could do the job better or cheaper than the state. Lawmakers sold the Accenture deal to the public on the premise that it would save the state tens of millions of dollars — and modernize an aging social service system as well. What a deal.

As the saying goes, when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Problems surfaced almost from the start of the contract with Accenture and its partners after the Texas Health and Human Services Commission signed the deal last year. In October 2006, then-Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn charged that 80,000 children had been dropped from state health insurance programs since Accenture took over and others had been improperly denied services. Strayhorn's inquiry also found that the project was $100 million over budget. Her warnings were largely dismissed by state leaders because she was running for governor at the time.

But even before Strayhorn came out with her findings, cracks surfaced in the Accenture project. There were reports that CHIP applications and other paperwork were lost and that families were wrongly denied social services or lost eligibility for services because Accenture workers made policy decisions they lacked training and experience to make.

Those failures would have been bad enough in any business. But the Accenture group wasn't manufacturing widgets — it was making decisions about people's lives. Failures in that business are measured by the numbers of Texans who go hungry, children who are wrongly denied health coverage and families who don't receive the benefits they depend on to survive.

In December, Texas Health and Human Services Commissioner Albert Hawkins slashed the contract with Accenture by $356 million and ended some of its functions two years early. Recognizing that privatization wasn't working well, he made massive hires and scrapped plans to cut thousands of state jobs, attempting to rebuild a state-run system that never should have been dismantled. As the state and Accenture worked out details of the new deal, worth $543 million, they came to a mutual decision this week to end the contract early, Hawkins said.

As for saving money, the state did not realize that goal, presumably because the contract was terminated early. The Legislature should order an audit of the contract to determine whether the state lost money and whether any losses can be recouped.

With the entire contract cancelled, Hawkins can and should continue rebuilding and modernizing, this time using state employees who have proved better at doing that job.