@mwalker / @michoel thanks for the responses, looking at the issue again i think the “problem" might have been with fields that are null/empty. i might have been looking at two different records or something and expecting the wrong behavior. i was returning the results of

nlapiLoadRecord

which for fields that are null it omits the field entirely, i’m using the JSON response in my ETL process and it doesn’t handle missing fields very well so i think that threw me off. i might just switch to using

nlapiLoadRecord

and manually constructing the JSON object my ETL tool is expecting