Since I am not the author of the code, I can't pretend to know exactly what the rationale is. When it was explained to me, I understood it to be a way of making sure that the office in a sense wasn't inundated by a number of requests that hadn't perhaps been examined carefully, that hadn't had some other kind of filtering system to limit the number that came forward. I may be wrong about that, but that's how it was explained to me at the time.
On September 20th, 2006. See this statement in context.