Having a GOCMD may be useful, but not like this.

In bigger systems, you may alter the PATH in the CI env or part of the Makefile itself, or PATH differs from machine to machine, OS to OS, etc, or you want to say that GOCMD is either "gofork" or "go".

Regardless of the situation you'd want to use an absolute path to the executable so that if you run make in verbose mode you'd see "/usr/bin/go" or "/home/user/local/bin/go" or "/this/is/not/the/real/go" printed. Being super strict about this pattern will keep you sane.