The BBC has admitted that it banked £106,000 that should have gone to causes such as Children in Need and Comic Relief in the latest phone-in scandal to affect the corporation.

Viewers who contacted fundraising phone-ins but whose calls were received just after the lines had closed were still charged for the call and a BBC subsidiary kept the money.

Sir Michael Lyons, Chairman of the BBC Trust, which uncovered the practice, expressed regret for what he described as “a failure in terms of the behaviour of staff and of the BBC’s own systems”. He added: “This did not help the BBC or the people we serve.”

Adding to the corporation’s embarrassment was a further revelation that it left out tens of thousands of phone-in votes in last year’s British heat of the Eurovision Song Contest, although it did not affect the result of the competition, which was won by Scooch.

One of the programme’s presenters, Sir Terry Wogan and Fearne Cotton, called mistakenly for votes before the phone lines had opened and although callers were charged, their votes were not counted. Calls received outside the voting period on the programme amounted to 38 per cent of the total.

The Eurovision heat took place on an error-strewn night for the programme, which involved viewers voting on who should represent Britain in the annual competition. At the end of the show, Sir Terry mistakenly announced the wrong winner and had to be corrected by his co-presenter.

Yesterday, Sir Michael ordered the corporation to hand over the £106,000 to the charities, plus £6,000 to cover the Eurovision mistake and added interest — resulting in a total payment of £123,000. “There may be disciplinary action. There is no room for complacency here,” Sir Michael said, and promised that the BBC would make an on-air apology to viewers.

The telephone calls were handled by a BBC subsidiary, Audiocall, part of its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide. It organised fundraising phone-in competitions on programmes including Sports Personality of the Year, Strictly Come Dancing and How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? Calls typically cost 25p, with half the money going to charity, but in some cases viewers were charged as much as £1.50.

Keeping all the money raised from late calls occurred between October 2005 and August 2007. There is no suggestion that anybody benefited personally from keeping the money, although the practice was known only to a small number of the corporation’s employees within Audiocall and uncovered only as part of a review of all phone-ins by the business consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The auditor, in its review, said that “the practice might be perceived as improper conduct” but it added that it had not had the chance to make a full investigation into why money that viewers intended to donate to charity was retained in BBC accounts. The BBC’s revelations come only a day after ITV admitted that a comedy award was wrongly presented to Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly when viewers had actually voted for Catherine Tate. ITV was fined £5.7 million by Ofcom for a string of other phone-in breaches.

“We are not talking about anything of the scale of what happened at ITV, even when you add all of the BBC’s lapses together,” Sir Michael said.

The BBC has admitted deceiving viewers by running phone-ins to programmes such as Blue Peter and Comic Relief in which callers had no chance of winning.

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