A simple Google search turns up this: All around the globe people are yukking it up at Nebraska's expense.

Again.

From New York City to Australia to India people are chuckling at the naïve Nebraskans who hired a state prison guard who turned out to be wanted by Interpol.

Enough.

By now it ought to be standard practice throughout state government to do a simple Google search along with other checks. That's all that would have been necessary to turn up the information about Michal Preclik that was missed when state officials made the requisite background check with the National Criminal Information Center. In most cases, the federal database would have turned up that Preclik was wanted for drug-related crimes and fraud on a warrant issued by the Czech Republic.

But state government's first check on Sept. 7, 2008, with NCIS was a day before Interpol posted the warrant. Preclik was fingerprinted on his first day of employment, Oct. 14, 2008, and the FBI ran the fingerprints through a criminal database a week later. Officials said that check also failed to turn up a warrant.

So Preclik worked for more than a year at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution and was even promoted to corporal before authorities discovered he was wanted. "I was shocked when I found out," officer Patrick Barker told The Associated Press. "Here we have a guy facing drug and fraud charges, and we're dealing with contraband issues at the prison."

The most embarrassing thing about the Preclik case is that it's not the first time state officials failed to do a simple Internet search when checking an applicant's background. In 2005, the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services rescinded a job it had offered after belatedly learning the hiree had been convicted in absentia in Rwanda of the 1985 murder of gorilla researcher Diane Fossey.

It's worth noting that the Preclik case also exposes the continuing weakness of the U.S. immigration system. Preclik originally came to Nebraska to work on a hog farm about 30 miles from Tecumseh with the help of a company that recruited Eastern Europeans as laborers in violation of their tourist visas.

The federal system is still fundamentally flawed. Federal officials say they don't know how many of the 39 million international visitors to the United States last year overstayed their visas. U.S. officials were able to confirm the departure of only 92.5 percent of them. It's disturbing that this problem lingers eight years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Nebraska officials can fix this problem easily by mandating a simple Internet search. The problems in the federal system will be much more difficult to solve. There's nothing funny about that.