City officials have ordered the San Francisco Roman Catholic Archdiocese to pay nearly $3 million in health care costs for more than 1,000 employees after finding that it failed to make years of payments required by a pioneering local health care law.

San Francisco has also assessed the archdiocese $113,000 in penalties.

“It’s important for us to ensure that workers are made whole,” said Pat Mulligan, director of San Francisco’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement.

The law, known as the Health Care Security Ordinance, requires businesses with more than 20 employees who work at least eight hours a week in San Francisco to make payments toward the workers’ health coverage, either by providing insurance or by paying into a health care savings plan. But a city audit of archdiocese records from October 2009 through June 2016 found that the religious organization had failed to make payments for a majority of its 1,722 employees covered by the law.

The archdiocese, which oversees Catholic institutions in San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo counties, disputes the city’s findings that it violated the law, spokesman Mike Brown said. Among other things, he said, the archdiocese contends at least some of the 1,086 employees did not work in San Francisco and therefore were not covered by the ordinance.

“While we don’t concede we are in violation, we also don’t believe that the numbers are correct, and we are working in good faith with the city to find the right figures,” Brown said.

Full story at The San Francisco Chronicle.