Thanks for the help everyone and sorry for the late reply. I tried checking the $( var and its seems you were right. In production, the gid for 'userGroup1' is in the list but its not in the list on test. If i log in as 'user1' and check groups for 'cgiUser', it lists 'userGroup1' for both environments. I hadn't thought about the need to restart the server but I guess this is probably what's causing it huh? I can request a server restart and see what happens.

Just for the record, files written by the scripts are owned by 'cgiUser' and one of its groups on both environments and 'cgiUser' has at least rx all the way up the path tree.

Thanks for the help!