 To the Dataria, which was commissioned to grant many Papal indults and favors, remained only the faculties to investigate the fitness of candidates for Consistorial benefices, which were reserved to the Apostolic See; to write and dispatch the Apostolic Letters for the collation of those benefices; to dispense from the conditions of those benefices; and to provide for the pensions or for the execution of the charges imposed by the Pope in the collation of those benefices.The procedures of the Dataria were complex and primarily regulated by customs, which the officials of the Dataria zealously guarded, being generally laity, and who had by such guarding instituted a species of monopoly of the faculties of the Dataria, as detrimental to the Apostolic See as it was personally profitable to them.Thus it happened that its offices often descended from father to son, while the ecclesiastical superiors of such officials were to a great extent blindly dependent upon them.