Small businesses, so they say, provide jobs for more than half of all U.S. employees, pay 44% of this country’s total private payroll and have created more than 60% of new U.S. jobs over the past 15 years.

So when I received six letters in the mail yesterday from the IRS, I figured they were probably refund checks resulting from a shrewd congressional plan to provide a direct financial stimulus to the people who actually power America’s economic engine, as opposed to giant corporations who are so patriotic they’ll happily move their headquarters to the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their share of a U.S. tax burden that then falls more heavily on us.

Actually, I am far too cynical to expect good news from the IRS. So I wasn’t disappointed when it turned out the six letters were four-page notices telling me that they knew that I hadn’t filed a 941 Employer’s Quarterly Federal Tax Return, that I must do so immediately and include all the money I owed them plus penalties and interest, or else fill out a form including my excuses for why I hadn’t done so.

Each notice was identical except that each covered a separate calendar quarter, beginning with the last quarter of 2008. Each notice included a copy of a pamphlet detailing My Rights as a Taxpayer, a copy of the official IRS Privacy Policy and a return envelope whose postage was not paid. They could have included all the same information in a single envelope by stating that I hadn’t filed a 941 return for the following quarters, and then simply enumerated them, but apparently that wouldn’t have wasted enough taxpayer money.

So here’s the thing: I was quite aware that I hadn’t filed a 941 return on behalf of my company for the past six quarters. That’s because a 941 return shows how much money a company pays out to its employees for payrolls, and how much taxes it has collected on behalf of the IRS. And my company has not had any employees since 2007, the same year I sold the company’s operations, changed the company name and went into an entirely new business, which I am able to operate myself, without benefit of employees.

The IRS knows this, or would if it simply checked its own records. But instead, some government computer algorithm probably made a list of all small businesses that used to pay payroll taxes but no longer were doing so, and automatically sent out notices to each business, one per affected quarter, under the assumption that collecting delinquent payment from a small fraction of scofflaws would make up for the cost of mailing out scare notices to the majority of business owners who hadn’t filed payroll tax returns because they no longer had payrolls.

I personally enjoyed filling out the same form six times, and checking the same box saying I had no employees during the period covered by the notice, signing my name six times and updating all my telephone numbers six times, then folding the return forms backwards so the IRS address would show in the envelope window, sealing the six envelopes and putting six stamps that my company paid for on the six envelopes, thereby discovering I had used the last of the stamps and had to drive across town to the post office to buy more stamps because I had a due bill that needed to be mailed the next day.

So all in all, I spent more than an hour dealing with the wonderful multiple missives from our National Collection Agency – an hour I otherwise could have applied to billable work, or at least the pursuit of new billable work.

As an American small-business owner, I can say it’s really swell to be appreciated.

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