SACRAMENTO (Scripps-McClatchy)--Somewhere in the San Diego area, there's a dentist who's probably still grinding his teeth over his latest brush with California s tax collectors. During one week in September his office received an avalanche of tax forms in the mail -- 16,000 sets of forms in 16,000 individual envelopes. "We did it," admitted Suzanne Schroeder of the state Employment Development Department. "It was a computer problem." The glitch occurred in a mailing of 1.4 million pieces that is sent out each quarter to employers, Schroeder explained.

The department was using new computer software for producing address labels which was provided by the U.S. Postal service, Schroeder said. The Postal Service software was designed to read the word "suite" abbreviated as "ste," she continued. But the addresses in the department's database abbreviate "suite" as "su". When the software couldn't read "su", it was supposed to jump to the previous line and read it again, Schroeder said. But for this particular address, there was a foreign spelling on the previous line and the software couldn't read that either. That set off a series of other jumps, she added, until the computer began spitting out the same address over and over again. "We alerted the postal authorities and they corrected the problem with what they call a 'software patch,'" she said.

Schroeder wouldn't reveal the name of the dentist, but she said he called the department and the mail was picked up and returned to Sacramento. The postage bill for the bogus mailing totaled $4,064. The software package, meanwhile, is supposed to save the department about $5 million a year, she said. "We mail out 68 million pieces yearly ... so, you can see we have quite a large operation," she said.