Anyone looking for fire and brimstone in response to an editorial in this week’s Hillsboro Free Press is going to be disappointed.

We would like to publicly thank publisher Joey Young for acknowledging the accuracy of everything we reported in our three newspapers last week about the Internal Revenue Service filing a $113,756.87 lien against his company for non-payment of federal withholding and unemployment taxes, penalty, and interest.

Making sure the story was right was why we not only inspected all relevant records but also contacted him to allow him to add his own comments to our story.

We also thank him for agreeing with us on the main point of our editorial last week — that government does small businesses no favors by requiring them to jump through all the same costly hoops that mega-corporations do regarding calculating and paying taxes.

As for the rest of his editorial: Well, if I were hit with a $113,756.87 lien from the IRS, I’d probably be a bit ticked off, too, and might be tempted to describe our editorial, which was mainly about agonizing over having to report the story, as pot shots and low blows.

— ERIC MEYER