Permissions issue with Time Machine backup store

I am struggling with a Time Machine permissions issue on an iMac running OS X 10.10.2 + OS X Server 4.0.3, and backing itself up to an external USB disk.
Backups complete successfully, but I am unable to carry out any user-level operations such as accessing the "time travel" interface via Enter Time Machine from the menu bar. Invoking Enter Time Machine fails with the error Can't connect to a current Time Machine backup disk. Likewise, although tmutil will correctly list the backup destination, tmutil listbackups produces an error:
$ tmutil listbackups
2015-02-05 16:53:19.413 tmutil[29181:2324148] Error enumerating (null): The file “Backups.backupdb” couldn’t be opened because you don’t have permission to view it.
No machine directory found for host.
My system logs are full of similar error messages from Finder.
On the back volume, the permisisons to the store are set to owner root and group wheel, and there is an access control list applied to the directory and Backups.backupdb:
$ ls -lae
total 2688
drwxrwxr-x  12 root  wheel      476 Feb  4 22:29 .
drwxrwxrwt@  9 root  admin      306 Feb  4 11:57 ..
0: group:everyone deny add_file,add_subdirectory,directory_inherit,only_inherit
drwxrwx---+  6 root  wheel      204 Jan 30 13:49 Backups.backupdb
0: group:everyone deny add_file,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,writeattr,writeextattr,chown
-rwxr-xr-x@  1 root  wheel   115716 Nov 13 02:43 tmbootpicker.ef
The problem is clearly the drwxrwx--- permissions applied to the store. I can temporarily revert these with chmod, after which all the user-level operations described above work correctly. But on the next backup, backupd will revert the permissions to give wheel write access and remove rx privileges for everyone else. It doesn't leave anything in the system log to suggest why it is making this change.
I have a MacBook also running OS X 10.10.2, without the Server pack. This also backs up to a (different) external volume. On this volume the owner, group and access control list for the store are set as above, but the permissions are (and remain) what I would have expected, drwxr-xr-x.
Is there any obvious reason why backupd should be modifying the permissions in this way — and is there any way to stop it?

Thanks - I was seeing exact same problem on one of my client's machines (10.10.2 with OS X Server). I could see wrong group of "wheel" but wasn't certain that just changing to "staff" would be enough - but seems to have sorted things out

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    When upgrading to 10.8 and then installing the server app, the upgrade conveniently didn't migrate any file sharing settings, forcing me to set them up again. Easy enough, just took a couple of minutes, except that the share point I used for time machine backups has no more setting to turn it into a Time Machine volume.
    As such, under the Time Machine tab, which shows only logical volumes, I simply can't back up to our existing backups.
    I suppose I can re-partition the array to create a logical volume for TM backups, but I can't believe that there is no provision to change a sharepoint into a TM volume anymore.
    Am trying to stay away from CLI settings as well as that defeats the purpose of the app.
    Any thoughts or suggestions?
    Wolfman

    I have asked the hosts to move your post to the OS X Server forum.

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