EU-citizen and allowances

Requirements
An EU citizen in the Netherlands has the right to apply for allowances when they are registered with a Dutch municipality (GBA) and fulfill the general criteria of application for an allowance. Thus IND-registration is not necessary, BUT it is very helpful. This IND-registration will smoothen the process of dealing with your application considerably.

What happens when you do not have an IND-registration?
The application forms are processed by a computer. This computer will turn down your application for an allowance when there is not IND-registration given. You can then call the Taxoffice, department Toeslagen, to inquire in how your application is doing. Only than a person will look at your application and can easily manually change the input from the computer. In order to do this the person will ask you to send a copy of your passport. However, as the computer receives 8 weeks to process the application, employees cannot change anything before the 8 week period has passed. So you will first have to wait 8 weeks and than call the Tax Office (0800-0543). It will not help if you send a copy of your passport sooner, as the computer cannot process it.

Dutch only
An extra hurdlle to take is that the people behind the Tax Office phoneline are only allowed to speak Dutch. Now of course you might find yourself a helpful person who will bend the rules a little and help you in English, but this is not always the case.  On top of this the Tax Office is not allowed to provide information to a third person, thus it can only answer to you. There is a way around this problem, as you and a third person (who does speak Dutch) can send the Tax Office a written mandate where the Dutch speaking person is allowed by you to deal with your Tax issues concerning the allowances in correspondance with the Tax authorities.

Conclusion
Registration with the IND benefits you.