Check Whether a User Exists

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I want to create a script to check whether a user exists. I am using the logic below:

# getent passwd test > /dev/null 2&>1
# echo $?
0
# getent passwd test1 > /dev/null 2&>1
# echo $?
2

So if the user exists, then we have success, else the user does not exist. I have put above command in the bash script as below:

#!/bin/bash

getent passwd $1 > /dev/null 2&>1

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "yes the user exists"
else
    echo "No, the user does not exist"
fi

Now, my script always says that the user exists no matter what:

# sh passwd.sh test
yes the user exists
# sh passwd.sh test1
yes the user exists
# sh passwd.sh test2
yes the user exists

Why does the above condition always evaluate to be TRUE and say that the user exists?

Where am I going wrong?

UPDATE:

After reading all the responses, I found the problem in my script. The problem was the way I was redirecting getent output. So I removed all the redirection stuff and made the getent line look like this:

getent passwd $user  > /dev/null

Now my script is working fine.

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