A responsible vendor then declines to take the project (smart decision) or executes anyway. We've been in the situation a few times where what started as an attractive project with a reasonable budget turned out to be an underestimate and we barely earned back our salary expenditures on the project.

Those companies did continue to do business with us though and we've normally earned back our losses and more on future projects.

That's what honest vendors do. That's not what IBM did.