What does a successful user update really return?

[sv]

Per the documentation, "Whether you create, retrieve or update a user account, the Provisioning API returns an Atom XML response in the same format."

What I'm seeing when I update a user via the protocol directly that the return value, at least in some cases, appears to reflect the state of the user before the update. For example, if I update the name information (i.e. givenName), the returned value contains the old name rather than the new name. But in other cases, such as when I update the username, that the returned value reflects the updated username.

Thanks,

sv