For a year now, Keyontay Wallace, 26, has been waging a quiet battle against the state of Oregon.

“When he feels like something ain’t right, he’s going to go for it,” said his mother, Martha Lewis, in a telephone interview. “He’s going to do what he needs to do to get it right.”

The issue is that the state was garnishing money from Wallace’s paychecks, and he believes it did so in error.

In short, the Oregon Department of Human Services contends that, beginning in late 2018, Lewis’s household failed to report all the income it had earned, and as a result it received more aid from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program than it qualified for.

The offending unreported income appears to have belonged to Wallace, her young adult son, who lived in her garage for a period, and who the

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