The high cost of paperwork stems from the inefficiency and inconsistency that it introduces into business processes. Dealing with paper is slow. Paperwork gets lost. Processing paper manually leaves a lot of room for human error. Paperwork is inefficient.
If the time spent dealing with paperwork could by replaced by document scanning, employees' productivity would improve greatly. there aren't many businesses that have a lot of idle hands sitting around, which leaves three possibilities:
This is not a trivial amount of time or money either. Chances are, the costs associated with wasted productivity far exceed whatever is being spent on the hard costs mentioned above. For many organizations, the amount of money unwittingly spent on wasteful processes would be truly shocking.