Chris Cranford, uploaded a tests which demonstrates the issue on a sample @ManyToMany. My understanding is that the @ManyToMany with the @JoinColumn is the owning side and the @ManyToMany with the mappedBy is not. If you run the attached test as is, it has revision_on_collection_change=false and the test fails b/c the read entity does not have the relationship. It can also be seen from the logs that an audit record is not inserted for the relationship record. If the test is updated to have revision_on_collection_change=true, then the audit record is written (as seen by sql logs) and the test passes.