Confidentiality agreements between the BBC and top radio stars are preventing full scrutiny of the way the corporation spends public money, a report from an influential group of MPs has said.
The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee said the BBC appeared to be paying some of its radio presenters more than twice what commercial stations pay theirs.
The BBC refused to give the National Audit Office (NAO), the public spending watchdog, a breakdown of presenters' salaries for a selection of radio shows unless the NAO signed a non-disclosure agreement, the committee said.
Edward Leigh MP, the chairman of the committee, said it was "disgraceful" that the BBC could dictate what the NAO could inspect when public money was at stake.
The report on the efficiency of radio production at the BBC said the government should arrange for the NAO to have legally-guaranteed right of access to the BBC's expenditure, including presenters' salaries, as it does for other publicly-funded bodies.
Mr Leigh said: "The NAO has a statutory right to examine the details of expenditure in any government department. It has no such right of audit access to the BBC, despite the fact that the Corporation is funded with over £3 billion of public money each year."
The report found that programmes such as Sir Terry Wogan's Wake Up to Wogan on Radio 2 cost on average twice as much per hour as the most expensive commercial breakfast show. For the corporation's breakfast and "drivetime" shows, presenters' salaries accounted for around three quarters of the total staff costs.
The corporation needed to establish why it was paying more than other stations for presenters and use its standing within the industry to negotiate better-value contracts, the committee concluded.
Jeremy Peat, a BBC Trustee, said: "The Trust is committed to ensuring value for money for licence fee-payers. That's why we have commissioned a series of such studies from the NAO and others.
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"We have always previously supplied the NAO with the information they request and it is in our interests to do so, in order to ensure studies with robust conclusions. We were therefore disappointed that - in contrast to other auditing organisations we work with - on this occasion the NAO wouldn't sign an agreement to ensure that the BBC did not breach its legal obligations to staff."
