The benefit is that you can reject bad requests to an API more easily.
For one application I used a base 58 encoded value. Part of it was a truncated hmac, which I used like check digits. This meant I could validate IDs before hitting the DB. As an attacker or script kiddie could otherwise try a resource exhaustion attack.
So in the age of public internet faceing APIs and app urls, I think built in optional check digit support is a good idea.
