COEUR d'ALENE - There's one more tax issue Kootenai County has to resolve.

The county has been overpaid nearly $70,000 by the state in tax relief funds, said county Finance Director David McDowell on Monday.

County staff made the discovery last fall, McDowell said, at the same time they uncovered that the county had failed to distribute more than $1.4 million to taxing districts.

"I can't tell you which system is at fault." McDowell said of whether the error occurred on the county or state side. "This is kind of like the last piece of the puzzle, and everything will be square with the state and the taxing districts."

The extra $67,580.54, which the Idaho State Tax Commission distributed to the county in 2007, was intended for the property tax relief, or "circuit breaker," program.

The county commissioners voted unanimously at their public meeting on Monday on a memorandum of agreement with the state to settle the issue.

The county, which McDowell said has not yet spent the funds, will not give the money back. Instead, the state tax commission will balance out the error by lowering its next tax relief installment to the county.

"We were anticipating a conversation in Boise with them (the state tax commission), but now that we have this, we probably don't need to," Commissioner Todd Tondee said at the meeting.

Renee Eymann, ISTC spokesperson, said those most familiar with the overpay were not available on Monday.

But she was told that a computer glitch was to blame, Eymann said.

"We had a spreadsheet of all the claims, and the individual lines were correct, just the total at the bottom was incorrect," she said. "It didn't add up all the lines correctly. That's where the overpayment came in."

The next installment will be distributed in June, she said.

"It will all be a wash and be even," she said.

Last fall, the county discovered that $1.4 million in property taxes - and later, an additional $151,000 - had not been given to local taxing districts because of confusion with the distribution.

A retired county employee from the clerk's office also faces a grand theft charge for allegedly embezzling $139,000.

McDowell said when the overpayment was discovered, county staff was "no more surprised than we were for the other (issues)."