In Sweden everyone gets around 110 euro per month as a child subsidy, you don't even need to apply. It just shows up in your bank account. At age 16 the benefit goes directly to the child.
The main difference is that in Sweden you don't need to do any paperwork to claim it, it is automatic.
The thing with these kind of benefits is that the bureucracy involved in dispensing them often costs close (or more) than the money dispensed. The system is more efficient if you just let everyone have it. It is one of the core arguments of UBI vs Welfare.
In this case the benefit still counts as welfare, not UBI obviously. However since the dispensing of the benefit is so simple (registered with tax agency, which is required to have an ID) it carries the same argument. If UBI was a thing in Sweden it would work the exact same way sans a check for parent-child relationship.
Also the amount per child grows slightly with every child up to 4 I think.
How is it checked that you're eligible? Asking because the system in the Netherlands could be defrauded, people registering to be living in the country, registering X amount of children, then going back to live in a cheaper country. Not sure if their children were actually real either.
(this was a relatively isolated incident but as these things go, they overreacted, set up software that over-eagerly identified families as defrauding the system and taking their benefits away, causing widespread chaos and a still-running compensation program that's costing the government years tens of billions to set right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...)).
If the child are registered with the tax authority and have a personnummer (ID number) then the parents get it at their tax-authority registered bank account.
About that kind of fraud I never heard anything like that in Sweden, but I would assume social services checks if children are attending school and if they are not, they investigate the parents. So this kind of fraud shouldn't be possible long-term. Social services would get called if a child doesn't show up for school or is not registered in any schools pretty quickly.
I also think that home-schooling is illegal, but not sure on the specifics.
Everyone with a child. Or half of them anyway, since it goes to one parent only (at least for parents that live together).
It's not really transferred to the child at age 16. What typically happens at that age is that the child has completed all mandatory years in school and move on to optional education and then they get paid for studying.
Yes, sorry I mis-explained the 16-year thing. I think one highlight of that is that the benefit shifts to being paid by the CSN (Sweden board of student finance, they are the ones who provide subsidized student loans as well) and it is tied to you being a student. So if you drop out of high school you stop getting this benefit.
