Add New User Breaks

When I add a new user the account is given an ID of 0 and there is no associated meta data with it. What I did was go into the database and assign it the next higher ID. From there I went into WP admin panel and edited the user to give them the meta data like first/last name, etc. It saves successfully. However, after a unknown period of time that user’s meta data is lost and the meta data is no longer available (no role assigned, etc) and they cannot log in. This seems to happen when I cut the database over from dev to prod. The collation of the db on dev is utf8mb4 and on prod it’s utf8. I deactivated all the plugins and the issue persisted.

I have never come across this problem before. Any ideas?

Thanks,
~Steve