If someone 'steals my identity' and gets my tax return money before I do, it could be quite a lot of work for me to prove to the IRS that it was stolen and that I should get the money. Which shifts the burden of dealing with identity theft onto legitimate claimants.

I wouldn't be surprised if this same thing could happen with social services, but I don't have much experience with the system.

In other words, I'm not sure if the overall problem we're trying to solve is simply "avoid waste" - it might be more like "prevent the average person from having their identity stolen and their time/money wasted". Which seems like a problem worth trying to solve even if the incidence is relatively low?

Keeping the average business owner from being harassed by fake/false/dubious unemployment claims would also be good.

In California alone, at least 20 Billion dollars (over 10%) in pandemic relief funds were fraudulently given away. Quite a bit of it went to felons in jail! This is surely an underestimate. The Netherlands are not comparable to the US. Americans don't trust our institutions because by and large, they aren't trust worthy.

In absolute terms, 120-150 million Euros is still a vast sum of money. It's still worth trying to crack down on.