I'm writing this from memory, so it may be wrong, but as I remember it: parents would receive "modest" support; a much larger part would go directly to the daycare, outside of the parents' view. Now if the daycare was deemed to be illegal/fraud/..., the parents would be on the hook for both the money they received as well as the money the daycare received.
Again, I may be misremembering - but this is definitely one way to put a mom into 100s of thousands of debt that she'd never seen.
They should stop doing that. The wealthy pay more taxes, so refund them as free childcare. If you think the wealthy are getting away with something under a universal entitlement, raise their taxes.
And considering GDP as the most important metric isn't peak dumbassery ?
On of the examples in a mother with 3 children who had to pay back a hundred thousand Euro that were classified as wrongly received benefits. That means she received tens of thousands of Euros per year! What an insane burden to put on mother.
If something goes wrong the consequences are gigantic. Just like it happened in this scandal.