It appears that the time given by the 'date' command when logged in as a user is different than the one given when logged in as root. What is the cause of this discrepancy?

Without arguments, the date command prints the current time for a chosen timezone.

The date command uses the timezone information specified in environment variable TZ when printing dates. If TZ is not set, or is set invalidly, date will instead use the timezone specified in /etc/localtime.

To see the value of the TZ environment ...