I think you might be pleasantly surprised to find that if we all just collectively agreed not to do a lot of that paperwork, absolutely nothing bad would happen.

I have worked for more than one company that had paperwork requirements that, once traced down, had their causes and effects commingled and were a self-perpetuating problem that was causing itself.

Surely some paperwork and documentation is important and serves a purpose that justifies the nuisance, but a good deal of it does not, and it could simply disappear if we could dispense with our collective obsession to document irrelevant information simply because it exists.