AUSTIN -- A top lawyer at the attorney general's office was fired last year when she raised concerns that her bosses were breaking federal rules as they scrambled to salvage a foundering technology deal that has cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

After Martha Fitzwater Pigott filed a grievance of her termination in September, records show, Attorney General Ken Paxton's office offered and signed a settlement to keep her on the state payroll for nearly six months and to keep the details of her complaint secret.

Fitzwater Pigott was overseeing a contract with tech giant Accenture, which was hired in 2010 by then-Attorney General Greg Abbott to overhaul Texas' antiquated child support system. In his run for governor, Abbott routinely touted the success of the Child Support Division.

But the nearly decade-long effort to super-charge child support investigations and streamline loads of data has been plagued with problems, including numerous documented failures by the lead contractor, which independent reviewers said lacked the technical skills to do the job.

Fitzwater Pigott had raised concerns about the deal in the fall of 2015, according to correspondence to the AG's office from her lawyer, which was obtained by The Dallas Morning News through the open records law.

Austin-based lawyer Phillip Durst told state officials his client was fired "under very suspicious circumstances." Weeks later, Paxton's office agreed to pay her several months of "emergency leave," a once-obscure benefit that's supposed to provide a few days of pay for bereaved state workers.

Durst told a human resources lawyer in Paxton's office that his client was a rapidly ascending employee with a shining record who worked weekends, and she was fired only after she raised concerns about the project.

"Pigott was terminated within a few weeks of her reporting and voicing concerns that [the Child Support Division] was not properly implementing or complying with federal contracting rules regarding its funding programs," he wrote.

The concerns raised by Fitzwater Pigott, who now works for another state agency, are unclear; she did not return calls. A secretary in Durst's office said he wasn't immediately available for comment.

Commonly referred to as "T2," the child support data project was in such disarray that earlier this year the federal government froze its funding, only to unfreeze it in May.

With that funding restored, Accenture is expected to ask the state for more money, while state officials are mulling whether to sue the company for not delivering on its promise or, more likely, shell out more money to get the job done.

Records indicate Fitzwater Pigott sounded the alarm weeks before several news reports would detail how, under Abbott's command, the T2 project had ballooned to a price tag of $310 million -- about $100 million over budget -- at the same time Accenture had delivered little of value to the state.

Years of reviews by independent software experts showed that each time Accenture dropped the ball, Abbott's office responded by giving the company more money and autonomy.

Charles Smith, a longtime Abbott aide, was in charge of the project during most of the tumult. Smith was recently appointed by Abbott to be the top official at the state's largest agency, the Health and Human Services Commission.

"To my knowledge, we followed all state and federal contracting rules and procedures during my tenure," Smith said through a commission spokesman.

Paxton spokesman Marc Rylander did not provide comment.

By the time Paxton inherited the project from Abbott last year, it had grown into a massive offshoring endeavor, with more than 165 programmers in India tapping into Texas' system to get work done and make fixes on a messy tangle of dozens of software applications that didn't play well together.

As details of yet another Texas technology contract blunder trickled out, and a House committee launched an investigation, Paxton removed about a dozen workers from the project.

As the project came to a halt late last year, Deputy Attorney General Mara Friesen said in a letter to the Legislative Budget Board that moving forward "would have resulted in runaway development costs, overly complex systems, increased maintenance costs and significant delays -- even as much as well past 2020."

Yet, according to Durst, Friesen was the supervisor who fired Fitzwater Pigott when she raised concerns about the contract with Accenture, which was in the process of being renewed with a higher price tag.

"Specifically, my client raised these concerns with her supervisor, Ms. Mara Friesen," but was told she had violated her supervisor's trust by doing so, Durst wrote in September.

Records indicate that Fitzwater Pigott was fired and removed from the Austin headquarters before she could gather her personal belongings or turn in her state security badges.

"As you can understand, I think the taxpayers of Texas and the funders of the [Child Support Division] programs will be very concerned if it is determined, as we believe, that the OAG was not properly complying with its financial obligations and that this program could be more efficient to the people it serves," her attorney wrote.

In response, Paxton's office offered and signed an agreement that kept Fitzwater Pigott on the state payroll through January 2016 with the stipulation that she not sue the agency. That deal to pay her emergency leave for not working was later extended until Feb. 14, when she took a job at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

In a series of stories earlier this year, The News revealed how the AG and several other agencies had misused emergency leave to pay out settlements or provide financial send-offs to favored employees, a practice Abbott and Comptroller Glenn Hegar subsequently ordered be stopped.

Leaders in both the House and Senate have pledged to close a loophole that allowed Paxton and other officials to dole out loads of emergency leave with no rules or oversight.

Fitzwater Pigott, who earned $113,000 a year, was given about six months of emergency pay in total, records show.