There is essentially none. You could write a check out to "Mickey Mouse" and deposit it into your bank account and I doubt anyone would notice.
If there is any verification, it occurs after the fact when someone complains that a payment got lost. Then the banks start looking to see what happened.
I once received a check to “The Estate Of <<my father>>”. I tried depositing it into a regular joint bank account that was under my name and my father’s name, and they rejected it and said I needed to open an account explicitly under my father’s estate, since you c can’t deposit a check to “The Estate Of...” to an account under the name of the deceased. I did the paperwork (my state allows you to file a Small Estate Affadavit in lieu of going through probate in some cases, mine included) and deposited the check.
Then I receive another check to “The Estate Of...” and take that to the bank, and they deposit it into the wrong account. Words cannot adequately express how I felt about this...
You would normally think so, but they (the banks) likely have a different viewpoint. They could either, for deposits into accounts in the bank:
1) slow down every deposit by an order of magnitude or more in order to perform careful identity verification, when the vast majority are correct and honest
or
2) expend effort, afterward, cleaning up, the very few that are doing something illegal using the records they keep on what happened, and the fact that they can simply reverse the transactions when they do find something amiss.
For them, the cost of #2 is likely still lower than the costs of #1.
Now, the situation is different if you go in with a check and try to negotiate it for cash in hand right then and there. They will do the full identity verification at that time, massively slowing down your one-time action of converting a check into US Dollars in your pocket. This of course makes sense, there is no way to reverse a transaction that involves handing someone a stack of fifty dollar bills that they stick in their pocket. But in this case, just the one individual that did need to be triple checked before the action completed had their time extended by the verification process.
