I don't know what kind of work you were doing, but sometimes data needs to be checked with human eyes for legal reasons, in which case you would actually be cheating.
It doesn't make any sense since your error rate is actually lower, but sometimes bureaucracies work that way.
I'd be surprised if that was true in this case. Especially given that the human operators were given about a days training and didn't have any knowledge beyond what was written down, so would have been pretty useless for checking anyway.
If that had been the case, I would have understood if they had explained that to me but it amused me that the immediate defence was basically "this makes everyone equally productive, so how do we know who is the most productive?".
It's sort of like being pissed off with people typing documents on computers because you can no longer tell who has the best handwriting (incidentally I had a similar issue at school when I submitted a typed essay once).
It doesn't make any sense since your error rate is actually lower, but sometimes bureaucracies work that way.