Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, the former trial lawyer lobbyist who looked out for the interest group while in the state’s highest office — even though doing so meant preventing decreased costs and increased access to care within her own state’s health care system — has a tax problem.

According to this letter from Sebelius to Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA), the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, respectively, the Kansas Democrat and her husband hired a CPA to “conduct a thorough review” of their tax returns for 2005, 2006, and 2007 “in preparation for [her] confirmation process as the nominee for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.”

While conducting his review, the CPA found that the Sebeliuses owed $7,040 in federal taxes, which was paid along with $848 in interest.

Sebelius sent the letter explaining her tax situation as a response to this letter from Baucus and Grassley requesting clarification about her initial and just-amended tax return documents for 2005-07.

The problem here isn’t, of course, that the Sebelius family made mistakes on their tax returns. With a tax code as lengthy and complicated as ours (and growing by the day, thanks to Democrats in Congress), it seems like mistakes on tax filings are the rule rather than the exception.

The problem, rather, is that, just like Tom Daschle, her predecessor as Obama nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary, Sebelius apparently waited until she’d been nominated for a senior administration position before bothering to check on those tax returns, deeming it superfluous to do so if she were merely going to be Governor of a state or a Senator representing that state’s citizens.

The attitude that attention to detail and accuracy in tax issues is for hoi polloi rather than elected officials appears typical of Democrats in general, and of Barack Obama’s nominees in particular. In fact, had so many previous nominees for positions in this administration — Geithner, Daschle, etc. — not been bitten in the backside by their (much larger, in terms both of dollar amounts and of willful cheating of the tax system) tax issues, it’s unlikely that Sebelius would have felt it necessary to make such an effort to uncover previous mistakes and to make those debts right by repaying them in full with interest.

Given President Obama’s track record in terms of nominations for high positions and of character judgment as a whole, it would have been surprising had Sebelius turned to be clean, on both the tax-error and lobbying front. Unsurprisingly, the former lobbyist and now-repaid back tax ower isn’t clean on either.

All that remains is the question of whether or not the Senate will bring itself to confirm yet another Obama nominee who has a history of tax issues.