DICKINSON (AP) - The city of Dickinson has decided to pay the entire amount of back taxes that the city and its employees owe the Internal Revenue Service.

The bill adds up to about $95,000. The city and its workers each owe $47,552 in unpaid taxes because of a payroll accounting error that went unnoticed for years. The city commission this week voted to cover the whole sum.

"It's too hard to go back and apply that to the individual employees when we have some that are no longer employed with the city," City Administrator Greg Sund said. "It ends up more or less punishing the (employees) that stayed here."

Since 1992, the city had been deducting Social Security and Medicare taxes from workers' paychecks after contributions to retirement plans had been subtracted. The Internal Revenue Service a few years ago declared that such taxes must be withheld before retirement contributions are made, City Attorney Matthew Kolling said.

The city's matching contributions to workers' plans also were going untaxed because of the error, meaning the city also owes the IRS money.

The money to pay the back taxes will come from the city's general, library and utility funds, according to Tina Johnson, the city's accounting manager. Under the IRS's statute of limitations, Dickinson will have to pay back taxes only going back to 2005.

City workers are not entirely in the clear. The city's payment of back taxes will be taxable as wages, Sund said.

The error was caught earlier this spring when Johnson and a Minneapolis-based firm handling retirement plans for Dickinson were reviewing the city's books.