You'd be amazed how much cheaper it is to have a human do it than pay for automation. But also, law/contract required the data to be accurate (so there were 3 people, at minimum, entering the exact same data and records would be flagged if any of the 3 did not match). OCR, at the time (and even now), is highly unreliable with human handwriting. Not that I disagree with your statement, automation would have been nice. And though I like to think we want humans doing higher-level things, a lot of the people there were happy to get decent pay and not have to think for their day job.