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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 state has said must himself pay $15,000 to make it right.
Wallace, who says he did not rely on his mother’s SNAP benefits or even live in the house for the entire period under scrutiny, learned about this predicament when he examined a paycheck for his job at a homeless shelter last year.
Listed after all the deductions—Medicare, Social Security, Oregon taxes, and more—there it was: “Garnishment: $271.40.” Other stubs had similar line items, and indicated several thousand dollars had been garnished in total.
Wallace texted his supervisor: “When you get a moment, can you explain what garnishment is.” His manager explained. Then Wallace’s battle began.
Wallace’s case has unique quirks, and few people would have the stamina, patience or determination to wage the fight as persistently as Wallace now has, without the benefit of legal counsel, since summer 2024.
And yet his basic situation—of getting tripped up and then stuck within an opaque bureaucratic system tasked with fitting complex unruly lives into neat categories of eligibility and deservingness—is likely in the coming months and years to be the fate of many more low-income Oregonians.
This is due to the major new federal law H.R.1, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Arguably the biggest change to the public welfare system in a generation, the law requires states to implement new and more complex hurdles for many low-income people seeking government benefits. For Medicaid-based systems like the Oregon Health Plan, the biggest changes remain more than a year off. But for the SNAP program, which provides food assistance to some 757,000 Oregonians, new requirements and bureaucratic checks must go into effect as soon as this fall.
As a result, the state expects that thousands of those people will no longer qualify for SNAP benefits, or simply stop seeking them due to the administrative complexity. But many of those who remain will be forced to get their papers in order to pass more frequent eligibility checks and demonstrate they meet newly applicable requirements—administrative headaches that will almost inevitably lead more people into situations like Wallace’s.
“That’s honestly been on my mind,” he says, reflecting on Oregon’s capacity to run a program going through such rapid, large-scale changes. “Seeing all the stuff coming to SNAP, I’m like, shit. Like they already ain’t got their shit together.”
A son of North Portland and a 2017 graduate of Benson Polytechnic High School, Wallace says his predicament began with what the state calls an “error.”
A spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Human Services, which administers the SNAP program, said the agency could not speak to a particular case, but that “ODHS does everything in our power to prevent overpayments because we know the repayment process can be difficult for people who rely on our services.” The spokesperson added, “When overpayments happen, they are almost always the result of complex and changing rules, not fraud.”
Oregon has one of the nation’s highest SNAP payment error rates—a statistic determined on the basis of an analysis of a random sample of beneficiaries. By 2024, Oregon had decreased its error rate from a reported high of 23% to 14%. But it must reduce the error rate even further to avoid an additional financial penalty established by H.R.1.
The state says H.R.1’s new administrative rules will make it harder to keep the error rate down. “H.R.1 requires significant and rapid change to policies, systems, processes, communications, and more,” says the ODHS spokesperson. “This level and frequency of change provides greater risk for error.”
Wallace, for his part, feels he committed no error in the first place—and that, even if an error did occur, the state has unjustly punished him while offering no meaningful recourse, instead hiding behind bureaucratic technicalities.
As Wallace puts it in one of his legal briefs, “ODHS’s entire position rests on procedural defenses: that notices were mailed, defaults entered, and more than 120 days passed before Petitioner requested a hearing.” The state, his brief said, “ignores the substance: disproportionate liability, absence of effective notice, an incomplete record, and the very real financial and personal hardship caused by ODHS’s collection practices.”
Or put another way: “I don’t like people throwing dirt on my name,” he says. “They’re treating me like I’m stupid. That’s the only reason I keep going.”
Sitting the other day at his apartment near the Portland train station, Wallace, described by his mother as a “geeky type kid,” wore a Back to the Future sweatshirt and sorted through legal documents and bank statements on his phone. His wife’s cat Winston scurried about the floor, knocking toys to and fro.
When Wallace learned in summer 2024 of the garnishments, he explained, he contacted ODHS. He described the situation to several people, he said, who transferred him from one person to the next. He eventually reached someone who helped clarify what appeared to have happened.
In mid-2018, Wallace says, he had returned home after a year of college, planning to take a gap year to help his mom and earn money for tuition. His mother, Lewis, received SNAP benefits for the household, but apparently didn’t report her son’s work history when he moved in. It was a tumultuous time and he didn’t return to college as planned. Wallace’s family became homeless after the ceiling collapsed in their house in the fall of 2018, he says, and he sometimes stayed with his family in a hotel, but also lived itinerantly, sleeping at work or in his car.
When in early 2019 his family got a lease on a new house in Southeast Portland, he was the first to move in, but, as a middle child of seven and reluctant to take up space in what he knew would be a crowded home, he declined to take a room and instead set up shop in the garage. (“He put a door. He put a wall,” his mother says.)
Wallace says he also put in a hot plate. He had several jobs and he rarely if ever ate his mother’s food. His presence in the house—which he and his mother both estimate had a fluid population of about 10 people living in it, plus or minus—was minimal. By August 2021, a lease he provided shows he was moving to his own place in Northeast Portland.
Documents filed by the state indicate it continued to believe Wallace was a recipient of the SNAP benefits that flowed into his mother’s house until December 2021—several months after the lease says he moved out. Asked why, during the time he did live with her, she did not enter Wallace’s income in her SNAP benefits portal, Lewis said her son had so many jobs, always changing, it was hard to track: “He’d have this job and next day he’d have another,” she says.
The state of Oregon has the federally mandated task of shunting such hectic lives into formal boxes of eligibility. And it appears in the case of Wallace to have found some kind of discrepancy that could not easily be placed in a box.
Having discovered his unreported income, the state determined SNAP funds to his mother’s household had been distributed in error, and it moved to collect. In court documents, the state says that between April 2021 and May 2022, it sent Wallace three letters alerting him to SNAP overpayments over three periods between 2018 and 2021, totaling about $15,000 he would have to repay.
Wallace says he never saw these letters; the notion of receiving this mail from his mother’s house seems absurd. (“Customer information is reviewed to use the most currently available address,” the state says. “If the mail is returned, an effort to retrieve a newer or more accurate address is completed and the notices are remailed. If the notices are not returned, we consider them to have been received.”)
By the time he discovered the garnishments and appealed the overpayment decision in September 2024, more than 120 days had transpired since the letters were sent. The formal period in which he could challenge the overpayment determination had thus passed—a point the state has made repeatedly in court briefings as it moved to dismiss his appeal.
Fast forward to October 2025, and still the case drags on. Wallace has in some ways got what he wanted: The garnishments, he said, ceased after he filed the appeal—though he was never told why. And in late 2024, he even got what a pay stub described as a “MISC GARN REFUND” of $565.59—a figure he cannot account for, though he suspects it’s tied to the evidence he gave the state that he’d left mother’s house earlier than it knew.
He still wants the rest of the money that was already taken from him back, and he wants the state to check its information. Why was it just garnishing his money and not the money of others in the family? How much in total did it take? Answers remain elusive.
At one point, WW showed Wallace a document, which he had not seen, listed in county records showing a lien on his name tied to SNAP overpayment: The figure differed slightly from the amount the state said in court documents he was overpaid. Wallace’s mild-mannered voice rose in exasperation: “This is what really gets me throughout this court case,” he said. “I’m noticing inconsistencies with the information they’re sharing!”
In contrast, he says, he continues to dedicate “all my free time” to making sure he is getting his own numbers right. Wallace, whose wife is pregnant, is seeking to move out of child care and homeless services work, and is back in school, pivoting to the facility maintenance trade. He speaks of how little sleep he gets, of how much he works. He spends nights uploading documents and, with the help of ChatGPT, drafting legal briefs, or correcting them when they are rejected for formatting issues. He mulls finding a pro bono lawyer. He vows to fight on.
“It’s not that much money,” he says, reflecting on the garnished funds. “But that much money to someone that lives a life like me could have been a big change. Like that $200 could be two days off. I could take my nephews out fishing.”
This reporting is supported by the Heatherington Foundation for Innovation and Education in Health Care.
