At a remove.
One other thing that does occur to me is this, sorry if to long
You can be at a distance from the problem.
Why am I saying this, well for a time I temped for the council and one of my jobs was arranging repayments of council tax. This means I phoned up people in debt and tried to get them to pay back, we had some leeway to make our decision however final decision is made by backroom CT officers who and this is important never had to deal with the public.
So sometime you get people who have fallen behind, and after a while and because you can see previous records you get a sense of whose bullshitting (ok not 100% accurate) you and who genuinely seems to be have problems at the moment, now you can get them to pay (in fact a lot of the genuine cases were quite willing, (people do weird things round debt and troubles at times by ignoring them or not dealing with them quick enough)) but it might not be the amount that's enough to get someone to pay by the new CT bill, maybe some months over but they'll pay and it probably helps them at least survive their current problems and get straight again.
Something like that could quite often get squished, and then pursued through things like attachments of earnings, for a larger amount straight out of there wages, so causing them further problems (I guess).
You see they don't have to talk to those people and so they are at a remove, its easy to be faceless and just see it as some numbers to crunch like that, its easy to ignore the impact it might make.
Its very easy for a computer to say no.